The  Crisis  of  Moral 


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HAimlD  BEGBIE 


L^^viiiiwft   HQj29\ 


^c 


THE    CRISIS   OF   MORALS 


By  HAROLD  BEGBIE 

THE  PROOF  OF  GOD 

A  Dialogue  with  Two  Letters.     12mo,  cloth.    Net  $.75. 

The  author  of  "  Twice-Born  Men  "  here  enters  a 
new  field  of  thought.  It  is  a  most  effective  book — 
one  that  will  be  read  and  passed  on  to  others. 
His  method  of  meeting  the  agnostic  and  the  skeptic 
is  admirable.  Here  is  philosophy  presented  in  con- 
versational form,  pointed  and  convincing. 

TWICE-BORN  MEN 

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"  The   Varieties    of    Religious    Experience." 

Frof.  William  James,  of  Harvard,  says:  "Mr. 
Begbie's  book  is  a  wonderful  set  of  stories  splen- 
didly worked  up.  It  certainly  needs  no  preface 
from  me.  I  might  as  well  call  my  book  a  footnote 
to   his." 

THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

An     Analysis     and    a    Programme.       12mo,     cloth. 
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In  this  indictment  of  the  present  wave  of  social 
impurity  there  is  no  doubt  of  Mr.  Begbie's  clear 
vision  nor  of  his  strength  of  purpose.  Why  is  vul- 
garity such  a  power?  Why  has  ugliness  got  such 
a  tight  hold  upon  us?  Why  is  respectability  a 
failure?  and  goodness  itself  so  barren  and  so  weak? 
These  are  some  of  the  propositions  upon  which  the 
author  has  built  up  an  indisputable  argument 
against  the  easy  respectability   of  the   present  day. 

THE  SHADOW 

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"  The  author  of  '  Twice-Born  Men  *  has  again  writ- 
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knew  wealth  and  poverty,  tears  and  laughter,  inno- 
cence and  guilt,  and  finally  the  deep  peace  of  true 
penitence.  There  is  profound  understanding  here  of 
human  nature  in  all  its  heights  and  depths,  and  a 
remarkable  grasp  also  of  the  psychology  of  con- 
version."— Christian  Intelligencer. 


c 


JAN  14 


The  Crisis  of  Morals 


An  Analysis  and  a  Programme 


HAROLD    BEGBIE 

Author  of  "  Twice-Born  Men  " 


**  Where  women  are  honored,  the  Divinities 
are  complacent :  where  they  are  despised, 
it  is  useless  to  pray  to  God.'* 


New  York  Chicago  Torokto 

Fleming  H.  Revell  Company 


London 


AND  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  I9i4»  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


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Then,  indeed,  will  be  the  stern  encounter, 
when  two  real  and  living  principles,  simple,  en- 
tire and  consistent,  one  in  the  Church,  the  other 
out  of  it,  at  length  rush  upon  each  other,  con- 
tending not  for  names  and  words,  or  half  views, 
but  for  elementary  notions  and  distinctive  moral 

characters. 

J.  H.  Newman. 


FOEEWORD 

WHAT  is  written  in  this  place  is 
written  chiefly  of  England,  my 
own  country;  but  the  indictment 
can  be  brought  equally  against  the  United 
States  of  America,  some  of  the  Dominions, 
and,  in  Europe,  with  unquestionable  jus- 
tice, against  the  great  cities  of  Germany. 
So  far  as  I  am  able  to  judge  from  recent 
reports,  a  similar  indictment  might  be 
brought  against  France  and  Italy. 

I  would  say  at  the  outset,  because  I  have 
written  what  follows  with  blood  rather  too 
heated  for  a  nice  discrimination  in  lan- 
guage, that  while  I  still  insist,  after  reflec- 
tion and  in  cold  blood,  that  Impurity  is, 
indeed,  the  chief  disease  of  this  age,  and 
that  the  chief  danger  of  civilization  does, 
indeed,  lie  in  a  dishonoring  attitude  to- 
wards Woman — I  would  say  that  I  am  con- 
scious throughout  this  monograph  of  one 

7 


8  FOREWORD 

serious  and  Tinalterable  weakness,  the 
weakness  that  is  possibly  found  in  all 
strong  feeling  and  in  every  intense  con- 
viction, the  weakness  of  insisting  so  ear- 
nestly on  one  side  of  a  question  that  the 
other  side  seems  as  if  it  had  no  existence 
in  the  writer's  mind.  Therefore,  on  the 
threshold  I  would  ask  the  reader  kindly 
to  carry  in  his  mind  the  memory  of  this 
apology,  and  to  assure  himself  that  the 
writer  who  ventures  to  address  him  in  this 
little  book  so  clamorously  and  so  fervently 
is  not  in  reality  the  despairful  victim  of  a 
fixed  idea,  nor  a  narrow-minded  and  melan- 
choly pessimist,  but,  rather,  one  who  loves 
life,  who  feels  in  the  very  air  the  noble 
qualities  of  this  difficult  age,  and  who  be- 
lieves with  real  assurance  that  the  hideous 
and  disfiguring  disease  of  the  period,  which 
stpreads  only  because  its  symptoms  are 
suppressed,  will  be  cured  directly  it  is 
faithfully  attacked.  H.  B. 


CONTENTS 


I 

The  Problem  of  Social  Exist- 

ence   

11 

n 

Where  Women  are  Honored 

23 

III 

The    Dominant    Passion    of 

Women 

30 

IV 

The  Tolerance  of  Evil  . 

42 

V 

A  Crisis  Between  Good  and 

Evil 

65 

VI 

A  Challenge  to  the  Church 

74 

VII 

A  Plan  of  Campaign 

87 

VIII 

The    Creative    Force    of    a 

New  Idea       .... 

101 

IX 

The  Telepathy  of  Purity     . 

113 

X 

The  Higher  Type  of  Mother- 

hood          

123 

XI 

Eeligion    Allied    with    Sci- 

ence          

141 

THE  PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL 
EXISTENCE 

A  QUESTION  has  come  to  me,  arrest- 
ing my  philosophy  of  life,  hindering 
my   happiness,    hammering   at   the 
door  of  my  sonl  for  answer. 

Why,  the  question  demands  of  me,  is  the 
problem  of  social  existence  still  so  far 
from  being  solved?  Why  is  our  science  of 
life  still  no  science  at  all!  Why  is  it  that 
so  much  chaos  and  confusion,  so  much  sus- 
picion and  enmity,  so  much  folly  and  vul- 
garity, so  much  degrading  baseness  and 
downright  good-hating  iniquity  still  holds 
us  in  a  nightmare  of  existence,  mocking 
our  hopes,  threatening  our  peace,  throwing 
down  the  temples  of  our  praise?  Why  is 
it  that  men  are  not  saner,  grander,  nearer 

to  divinity?    Why  is  it  that  life  loses  its 

11 


1^  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

dignity  more  and  more,  that  grace  and 
beauty  fall  away  from  us,  that  human  ex- 
istence still  presents  to  our  gaze  over  so 
wide  a  field  a  spectacle  that  is  ugly, 
cruel,  dreary,  and  so  profoundly  disas- 
trous? 

**  Our  civilizations,''  says  George  Rus- 
sell, of  Ireland,  '^  are  a  nightmare,  a  bad 
dream.  They  have  no  longer  the  gran- 
deur of  Babylon  or  Nineveh.  They  grow 
meaner  and  meaner  as  they  grow  more 
urbanized. ' ' 

Why  is  it  that  our  moral  happiness  and 
attainment  so  little  surpass,  if  they  do, 
indeed,  surpass  at  all,  the  happiness 
and  attainment  of  a  thousand  years 
ago? 

The  struggle  of  historic  man,  as  Sainte- 
Beuve  said  of  Pascal's  labor,  **  attests 
force,  depth,  and  an  ardent,  and,  so  to 
speak,  ravenous,  pursuit  of  truth";  but 
what  is  the  victory,  what  is  the  present 
reach  of  this  tremendous  energy? 

To  go  no  further  back  in  history,  recall 


PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL  EXISTENCE      13 

to  your  mind  tlie  shouting  and  the  shining 
hopes  of  eighteenth  century  revolution- 
aries :  trace  the  rise  in  the  early  years  of 
the  nineteenth  century  of  the  sober,  ear- 
nest and  powerful  spirit  of  philanthropy, 
born  of  Evangelical  pietism,  which  has  now 
covered  the  earth  with  benefactions,  which 
has  brought  into  existence  a  thousand 
agencies  for  human  welfare,  which  has 
breathed  a  new  spirit  into  our  national 
existence,  creating  in  this  stubborn,  slow- 
moving,  conservative  nation,  a  welded  na- 
tional democracy,  a  social  conscience: 
observe,  too,  the  Churches  waking  from  a 
long  sleep  and  descending  to  the  lives  of 
the  people,  not  only  with  a  more  reason- 
able and  more  persuasive  theology,  but 
with  earnestness,  with  enthusiasm,  and 
with  a  human  love  for  humanity:  behold 
the  hands  of  Science  spread  in  blessing 
over  the  whole  field  of  our  national  exist- 
ence: behold  statesman  and  politician 
doing  real  things,  and  great  things  for 
democracy:  behold,  indeed,  the  whole  orb 


U  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

of  civilization  transformed  from  what  it 
was  a  hundred  years  ago,  transformed 
from  top  to  bottom,  transformed,  through 
and  through — and  ask  yourself  why,  why 
in  spite  of  all  this,  is  life  so  unbeautiful, 
why  is  humanity  so  small,  why  is  the  heart 
of  man  so  unsatisfied? 

Think  of  our  multiplied  efforts  to  better 
human  life :  think  of  our  immense  religious 
activity,  our  costly  philanthropic  energy, 
our  furious  and  heroic  political  battles; 
think,  too,  of  the  giant  strides  made  by 
medicine,  education,  and  science, — think  of 
humanity's  progress  all  along  that  line, 
and  straight  in  that  direction  which  our 
forefathers  strove  to  follow  and  died  to 
reach  in  search  of  Utopia,  in  hope  of  Mil- 
lennium,— and  then,  considering  these 
things,  realizing  what  they  ought  to  mean 
to  the  body,  heart,  and  soul  of  civilization, 
ask  yourself  why  there  is  still  this  deadly 
disease  amongst  us  making  for  unrest, 
spreading  ugliness,  and  destroying  enthu- 
siasm? 


PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL  EXISTENCE      15 

Almost  every  inhTimanity  against  which 
Dickens  hurled  the  scorn  of  his  impetuous 
soul,  the  abolition  of  which  he  surely 
thought  would  bring  heaven  to  earth,  has 
been  abolished;  every  serious  thing  for 
which  the  Chartists  rose  in  rebellion  is 
now  the  commonplace  of  our  political  life ; 
the  dreams  of  the  nineteenth  century 
reformers  are  realized,  and  more  than 
realized;  we  have  left  the  landmarks  of 
Victorian  Radicalism  behind  us,  and  are 
embarked  upon  a  sea  of  Socialism — profit- 
sharing  has  struck  its  roots  in  the  sub- 
soil of  industrial  life,  age  is  being  pen- 
sioned, workers  are  insured,  the  road  is 
laid  from  national  school  to  university,  the 
State  is  becoming  the  doctor,  the  nurse,  the 
mother  of  the  nation.  And  with  these  tre- 
mendous and  wide-stretching  political  re- 
forms, there  is  reformation  in  the  lives  of 
the  people — drunkenness  is  no  longer  a 
scandal  of  national  life,  disreputable  con- 
duct in  public  is  no  longer  tolerated  in 
Great  Britain,  the  corruption  of  an  aristo- 


16  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

cratic  political  system  has  been  done  away, 
barriers  between  class  and  class  have 
largely  been  broken  down,  everywhere 
there  is  a  wonderful  spirit  of  kindness 
and  good  nature,  making,  if  not  for 
brotherhood,  at  least  for  charity  and 
tolerance. 

Nor  have  we  reached  a  stage  of  ex- 
haustion, a  perilous  stage  in  which  we  rest 
and  congratulate  ourselves  on  what  is  ac- 
complished; there  is  still  a  pressure  behind 
the  evolution  of  our  political  existence, 
there  is  still  a  manful  determination  to 
march  breast-forward,  there  is  still  a 
quickening  enthusiasm  for  humanity,  still 
that  saving  struggle  and  endeavor  which 
makes  for  health  as  well  as  for  advance. 
We  are  still  in  the  act  of  growth,  we  are 
conscious  as  never  before  of  creative  evo- 
lution, we  are  inspired,  as  our  forefathers 
never  were  inspired,  by  the  instinct  for 
transcendence.  Surely  there  has  never 
been  in  all  the  annals  of  history  a  period 
when  change  gathered  so  great  a  momen- 


PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL  EXISTENCE      17 

turn,  when  stagnation  so  completely  van- 
ished, when  the  present  was  so  full  of 
ringing  blows,  and  the  future  so  rich  with 
promise  of  victory. 

So  rapid  now  is  the  movement  of  prog- 
ress, so  imposing  the  reports  of  Govern- 
ment, that  a  man  who  spends  his  life 
among  the  gentle,  the  cultured,  and  the 
kind,  might  almost  think  that  the  gates  of 
Utopia  were  swinging  open  and  the  light 
of  Millennium's  dawn  shining  on  the  lifted 
brow  of  humanity.  But  to  leave  our  books, 
to  come  from  our  study,  to  forsake  the  so- 
ciety of  our  gentle  friends,  and  to  go  a 
journey  through  the  mighty  world  at  our 
very  door, — this  is  to  discover  that  the 
towers  of  Utopia  are  yet  hidden  in 
fuliginous  clouds,  and  the  dawn  of  Millen- 
nium blackened  and  obliterated  by  a  night 
as  dark  as  paganism. 

It  is  not  only  the  misery  of  the  very  poor 
that  rebukes  optimism  and  destroys  hope; 
it  is  not  only  the  exhalations  of  poverty 
and  wretchedness  which  choke  satisfaction 


18  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

and  silence  thanksgiving:  one  is  not 
broken-hearted  and  cast  down  merely  by 
the  squalor  of  the  underworld.  There  is 
something  in  the  model  town  of  a  philan- 
thropic manufacturer  which  chills  and  de- 
jects us — something  lacking,  some  soul, 
some  spirit,  some  touch  of  love  and  divinity 
missing,  which  leaves  its  orderly  respect- 
ability and  its  mathematical  efficiency  dull, 
wearisome,  tedious,  and  depressing.  And 
it  is  the  same  in  that  vast  environment  of 
the  metropolis,  which  we  call  the  suburbs, 
the  same  in  every  otiose  quarter  of  every 
city  and  town  throughout  the  country.  One 
is  not  merely  shocked  by  the  coarseness  of 
a  holiday  crowd,  not  merely  sickened  by 
the  degradation  of  a  racing  mob,  not 
merely  depressed  by  the  soullessness  of 
great  masses  of  mankind  seeking  their 
pleasure  and  finding  their  delight  in  un- 
worthy amusement;  no,  it  is  not  this  only 
which  makes  for  disillusion  and  dejection. 
One  is  stopped  dead  in  the  triumphant 
march  of  political  optimism  by  the  miser- 


PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL  EXISTENCE      19 

able  littleness  in  prosperous  humanity  of 
all  that  which  had  seemed  to  us  in  theory 
the  crowning  glory  of  the  race. 

If  one  listened  in  a  dream  to  the  Lau- 
damus  of  Heaven,  and  then  awoke  to  hear 
that  strain  of  immortal  adoration  trans- 
lated into  a  drawing-room  ballad  and  sung 
by  a  woman  grotesquely  dressed  in  the  last 
excesses  of  prurient  sensualism :  or  if  one 
saw  in  a  moment  of  spiritual  exaltation 
the  face  of  a  shining  angel,  and  came  out 
of  ecstasy  to  find  that  glorious  face  dis- 
figured on  our  glaring  city  walls  in  the 
service  of  some  swindling  and  corrupting 
advertisement:  or  if  a  man  who  had  cher- 
ished in  a  far  land  the  ideal  of  a  perfectly 
beautiful  and  perfectly  holy  mother,  re- 
turned after  many  years  to  find  her  hor- 
rible with  sin  or  hideous  with  vulgarity — 
such  disillusion  would  scarcely  exceed, 
would  scarcely  more  depress  and  more  em- 
bitter than  the  disillusion  of  the  political 
optimist  who  goes  to  humanity  for  the 
proofs  of  our  social  progress.  ^  ^  If  I  looked 


20  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

into  a  mirror,''  said  Newman,  ''  and  did 
not  see  my  face,  I  should  have  the  sort  of 
feeling  which  actually  comes  upon  me  when 
I  look  into  this  living,  busy  world,  and  see 
no  reflection  of  its  Creator." 

But  why,  why  is  man  not  happier, 
nobler,  diviner,  after  the  immense  effort  of 
humanity  to  lift  up  its  head  and  behold 
the  stars'?  Why  is  life  not  more  beautiful, 
more  dignified!  Why  is  vulgarity  such  a 
power?  Why  has  ugliness  got  so  tight  a 
hold  upon  us?  Why  is  respectability  a 
failure,  and  goodness  itself  so  barren  and 
so  weak? 

This  is  the  question  that  haunts  and 
mocks  me,  and  hammers  at  my  soul  for  an- 
swer. I  have  dreamed  so  many  dreams,  I 
have  clung  so  spontaneously  and  so  pas- 
sionately to  optimism,  I  have  hated  so  hon- 
estly, and  so  contemptuously  the  cynic,  the 
scoffer,  and  the  pessimist,  and  in  myself, 
at  the  very  centre  of  my  being,  I  am  still  so 
conscious  of  joy  in  existence,  so  grateful 
for  the  gift  of  life,  that  I  cannot  think, 


PROBLEM  OF  SOCIAL  EXISTENCE      21 

I  will  not  believe,  there  is  no  answer,  no 
clear  and  solving  answer  to  this  question. 
Wisdom  has  taught  me  in  many  a  hard  and 
difficult  hour  not  to  seek  far  afield  for  an- 
swer to  these  questions  of  the  soul,  not 
to  mount  upward  from  the  earth  on  the 
wings  of  philosophy,  not  to  forsake  man's 
abiding  place,  not  to  depart  from  the  com- 
mon heart  of  humanity.  If  there  is  an 
answer  to  this  question  it  must  be  one  that 
the  least  of  men  can  understand,  the  low- 
est of  men  be  brought  to  acknowledge;  it 
must  be  an  answer  that  will  solve  the  prob- 
lem of  life  for  the  most  ignorant,  the  most 
stupid  and  the  most  helpless.  Not  by  go- 
ing a  great  journey,  or  by  doing  a  difficult 
thing,  is  happiness  to  be  found.  Life  with 
all  its  difficulties  and  with  all  its  mysteries 
and  with  all  its  splendors  and  squalors,  is 
hidden  and  imprisoned  in  the  individual 
heart  of  man.  And  not  only  this  human 
life,  which  we  find  so  difficult,  but  the  eter- 
nal life  which  shall  make  amends  for  our 
bitter  sufferings  and  our  thousand  pains. 


22  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

*^  The    Kingdom    of    Heaven    is    within 
you. ' ' 

It  is  in  the  heart  of  man  that  we  must 
search  for  our  answer.  ^'  The  fault,  dear 
Brutus,  is  not  in  our  stars,  but  in  ourselves, 
that  we  are  underlings.'' 


II 

WHERE  WOMEN  ARE  HONORED 

IS  it  possible  that  the  answer  is  simple : 
not  only  simple,  but  old  with  the  ages 
of  antiquity:  an  answer  given  many 
centuries  ago  by  an  Eastern  seer? 

''  WHERE  WOMEN  AEE  HONORED,  THE 
DIVINITIES  ARE  COMPLACENT  :  WHERE  THEY 
ARE  DESPISED,  IT  IS  USELESS  TO  PRAY  TO 
GOD.^' 

Where  women  are  honored 

Like  a  strong  light  brought  suddenly  into 
a  darkened  room,  a  strong  and  steady 
flame  which  reaches  into  the  farthermost 
corners  and  chases  away  the  blackness, 
leaving  no  single  shadow  that  had  been 
left  by  a  lesser  light,  this  answer  solves 
for  me  the  riddle  of  the  question  and  il- 
lumines the  whole  region   of  our   social 

23 


S4  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

existence.  It  leaves  for  me  no  shadow,  no 
corner  of  darkness,  no  ghost  of  vague  per- 
plexity. It  shines  through  the  obscurity 
that  baffled,  and  the  darkness  that  op- 
pressed, it  lights  up  the  nearest  doubt  and 
the  remotest  objection;  verily  it  seems  to 
me  the  true  answer.  Woman  is  the  Secret : 
man's  attitude  to  woman,  the  decisive  fact 
of  human  life. 

We  have  been  like  a  musician  who  at- 
tempts to  tighten  the  strings  of  his  violin 
without  attention  to  the  bridge.  We  have 
tightened,  we  are  still  laboring  to  tighten, 
the  string  of  education,  the  string  of  sci- 
ence, the  string  of  physical  development, 
the  strings  of  political  and  religious  effi- 
ciency. But  we  have  forgotten  to  examine 
the  position  of  the  bridge  over  which  all 
these  strings  pass,  on  which  they  rest,  and 
without  which  they  can  produce  only  dis- 
cord. We  have  forgotten  Woman.  We 
have  left  out  of  our  count  the  very  bridge' 
of  life. 

Have  you  ever  thought  what  woman  is? 


WHERE  WOMEN  ARE  HONORED     25 

Have  you  ever  set  yourself  to  comprehend, 
so  far  as  mystery  of  such  wonder  can  be 
held  in  thought,  what  it  means  to  be  the 
mother  of  humanity?  Have  you  ever  con- 
sidered that  it  is  not  poetical  exaggera- 
tion nor  rhetorical  hyperbole  to  speak  of 
woman  with  something  of  the  same  rever- 
ence as  we  employ  to  speak  even  of  God? 
*^  Earth's  noblest  thing,"  ^^  the  holiest 
thing  alive  '' — these  are  not  empty 
phrases ;  they  are  the  only  rightful  tributes 
man  can  pay  to  the  mother  of  mortality. 
Woman  in  her  purity,  woman  in  her  mys- 
tery, woman  in  her  inmost  sanctity,  is 
earth's  noblest  thing,  and  is  the  holiest 
thing  alive. 

Thrust  out  of  your  memory  all  bitter, 
cynical,  and  taunting  things  said  about 
women;  forget,  so  far  as  you  can,  the  de- 
graded and  the  trivial  women  who  have 
touched  your  life,  either  for  disappoint- 
ment or  evil;  stand  clear,  though  it  be  for 
a  moment,  of  all  this  vulgar,  hateful,  and 
disgusting  show  of  modern  life,  and  con- 


26  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

sider  what  it  is  to  be  a  woman,  what  it  is 
to  be  the  mother  of  mankind. 

See  the  absolute  Woman  with  your  eyes 
clear  of  local  prejudice  and  contemporary 
experience:  see  her  as  the  fountain  of  life 
at  the  dawn  of  human  existence,  whose 
body  carries  the  sons  of  men,  whose  soul 
broods  upon  her  burden  like  the  sacred 
dove,  whose  breasts  nourish  that  holy 
stream  of  life  which  God  has  ordained 
should  water  the  earth  and  reflect  the  stars. 
What  depth  of  wonder  in  her  eyes,  what 
infinitude  of  love  in  her  smile,  what 
heavenly  healing  in  her  caress!  Can  you 
see  in  that  pure  brow  the  mark  of  vileness, 
hear  in  that  tender  voice  the  luring  tones 
of  practised  coquetry,  imagine  in  the  em- 
brace for  her  child  the  shuddering  im- 
purity of  a  sold  and  hated  iniquity? 

Is  it  not  as  manifest  as  the  sun  in 
Heaven  that  her  soul  lives  in  the  child  of 
her  heart,  that  the  whole  earth  exists  only 
as  the  floor  for  his  venturings,  that  the 
stars   are  not  numerous  enough  for  the 


WHERE  WOMEN  ARE  HONORED     Tt 

lives  she  would  bestow  upon  him?  Can 
you  persuade  yourself  to  think  that  aught 
on  earth  might  compare  in  her  heart  and 
mind  with  this  child  of  her  body,  or  so  sat- 
isfy the  cravings,  so  employ  and  sanctify 
and  rejoice  the  solicitude  of  her  being? 

Surely  to  be  Woman  is  to  be  one  with 
Nature,  Nature  that  has  evolved  in  that 
frail  and  gentle  form  the  very  soul  of  her 
own  birth-throes — conscious,  personal,  in- 
carnate Motherhood.  Surely  to  be  Woman 
is  to  feel  deep  living  and  quivering  in  the 
heart,  the  vibration  of  Nature's  final  pang 
and  attaining  agony — that  final  pang,  that 
attaining  agony  which  opened  the  gates  of 
life  and  crowned  creation  with  divinity. 
Whatever  else  may  be  found  in  Woman 
this  must  be  there,  and  this  in  the  ultimate 
analysis  must  be  regnant.  Woman  is  the 
source  of  existence,  the  mother  of  the  ages. 
She  stands  at  the  beginning  of  time,  on  the 
dust  and  drift  of  subsiding  chaos,  in  the 
first  dawn  of  emerging  beauty,  with  a  child 
at  her  breast;  and  to  be  the  mother  of 


28  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

humanity,  to  feel  for  ever  through  the  lips 
of  that  child  at  her  breast  the  giving  of 
herself  to  the  purposes  of  God,  this  was, 
this  is,  and  this  ever  shall  be,  at  once  the 
ministry  of  Woman  and  the  consecration 
of  mortality. 

Are  we  not  like  madmen  lost  in  the  mazes 
of  a  dream,  or  as  men  enticed  by  evil  spirits 
into  a  wilderness  of  illusion,  that  we  should 
think  of  Woman  except  as  the  Mother  of 
Humanity,  that  we  should  find  in  our  hearts 
for  this  sacred  fount  of  mortal  existence, 
aught  save  honor,  reverence,  and  love*? 

Is  it  possible  that  all  the  ills  of  life  flow 
from  this  one  irreverence,  that  our  blas- 
phemy of  this  sacred  maternity  is  the  one 
great  sin  that  crosses  all  our  good  with 
evil,  and  all  our  struggle  with  defeat! 
Where  women  are  honored,  the  Divinities 
are  complacent:  where  they  are  despised, 
it  is  useless  to  pray  to  God, 

Is  it  possible,  too,  that  our  irreverence 
for  women,  our  light,  frivolous,  or  cynical 
notions   concerning  women,   are   founded 


WHERE  WOMEN  ARE  HONORED     29 

upon  a  most  shallow  ignorance,  and  that 
the  whole  corruption  and  defilement  of 
women — spreading  this  universal  ruin — 
flows  from  one  single  delusion  so  trans- 
parently and  demonstrably  a  delusion  that 
it  should  not  cheat  even  a  clever  fool? 


Ill 

THE  DOMINANT  PASSION  OF 
WOMEN 

GOD  is  infinite/'  says  Coventry  Pat- 
more,  ''  all  else  is  indefinite,  ex- 
cept woman,  who  alone  is  finite, 
and  in  her  God  and  all  things  find  their 
repose.     She  is  Regina  Coeli,  as  well  as 
Regina  MundiJ^ 

If  you  doubt  this  sacred  character  of 
Woman,  compare  in  your  mind  the  highest 
term  we  have  invented  for  her,  the  word 
Mother,  with  that  lowest  term  of  disgust 
and  contempt  which  men  use  to  designate 
the  courtesan.  What  do  we  mean  by  the 
phrase  a  fallen  woman?  A  fallen  woman  I 
Fallen  from  what!  Why  is  it  we  say 
fallen?— why  is  it  that  even  the  most  com- 
passionate cannot  think  of  a  fallen  woman 

30 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     31 

without  shuddering  and  disgust?  How  is 
it  that  men,  the  most  coarse  and  the  most 
base,  speak  with  scorn  of  a  public  woman? 
Is  it  not  because,  consciously  or  sub-con- 
sciously, men  see  in  a  disreputable  and  a 
bad  woman  the  contradiction  of  an  original 
ideal,  the  disappointment  and  the  disillu- 
sion of  a  natural,  an  inherent,  and  an  65- 
sential  passion  of  the  soul? 

It  is  necessary  for  mankind  to  have  in 
the  world  a  Queen  of  Earth,  a  visible  em- 
bodiment of  God's  evolution  and  provi- 
dence ;  and  only  in  Woman  can  we  find  this 
finite  incarnation  of  creative  love, — and  in 
her  God,  and  all  things  find  their  repose. 
But  what  becomes  of  the  realm  when  the 
Queen  smirks  in  the  gutter? 

To  restore  Woman  to  her  throne,  to 
crown  her  afresh  with  honor  and  rever- 
ence, is  almost  to  bring  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven  to  this  troubled  and  disordered 
earth.  Nor  need  men  despair  of  such  a 
consummation,  saying  that  the  thing  is  a 
visionary's     dream.      No     revolution     is 


32  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

needed  for  this  coronation  of  Woman ;  our 
business  is  a  return  to  nature,  a  return  to 
God,  a  change  in  the  attitude  of  man's 

mind. 

For  although  Woman  is  Regina  Miindi, 
and  although  from  her  soul,  be  it  holy  or 
corrupt,  proceeds  the  sovran  influence  on 
mankind — for  it  is  women,  not  men,  who 
set  the  fashion  of  life  and  give  the  tone 
to  social  existence — nevertheless,  women 
are  chiefly  what  men  desire  them  to  be, 
they  are  at  once  the  mothers  who  respond 
to  the  least  cry  of  their  children,  and  the 
slaves  who  answer  with  obedience  to  their 
master's  call. 

If,  then,  man  desires  to  restore  Woman 
to  her  throne,  he  need  not  seek  to  change 
her,  but  must  set  himself  to  change  his 
own  attitude  of  mind  towards  this  sensi- 
tive, answering,  receptive,  and  impression- 
able creature  in  whom  God  and  all  things 
find  repose. 

And  to  do  this  it  is,  above  all  other 
things,  necessary  at  the  present  hour  that 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     33 

men  should  profoundly  assure  themselves 
that  a  bad  woman  is,  indeed,  a  fallen 
woman,  that  lust  in  woman  is  non-natural, 
that  even  lightness,  frivolity,  and  coquetry 
are  the  artificial  and  transitory  effects  of 
a  civilization  falsely  based  on  the  founda- 
tions of  an  intervening  barbarism.  In  her 
origin  Woman  is  Mother.  She  is  pure,  she 
is  chaste.  She  represents  to  mankind  the 
love  of  Heaven. 

If  your  mind  is  so  clogged  with  the 
cinders  of  vice  or  so  saturated  with  the 
poison  of  cynicism  that  you  start,  as  if 
from  a  blow,  at  this  essential  proposition : 
if  you  laugh  in  your  dark  mind  as  though 
I  proposed  to  you  a  thought  at  variance 
with  the  whole  history  of  human  experi- 
ence: if  you  would  immediately  push  me 
out  of  your  broad  way  as  one  who  is  the 
foolish  victim  of  hallucination:  if  you  pos- 
sess in  your  soul  no  memory  of  a  veritable 
mother  that  gives  pause  to  this  hasty  and 
impatient  judgment:  if  you  have  in  your 
heart  no  hope  of  such  love  from  woman  as 


34?  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

transfigures  life  and  lifts  the  sonl  of  man 
to  Heaven — at  least  stay  to  face  this  mani- 
fest and  arresting  truth  that  in  the  whole 
sphere  of  the  animal  world  there  is  no 
female  thing  without  the  instinct  for  ma- 
ternity, no  creature  that  can  be  remotely 
likened  to  a  fallen  woman. 

Among  the  creatures  of  the  earth  there 
is  no  single  thing  even  faintly  resembling 
a  courtesan.  Throughout  nature,  the  fe- 
male has  but  one  passion,  which  is  the 
reproduction  of  her  kind:  the  higher 
creatures  mate,  and  in  some  cases  mate 
for  life,  only  for  the  family :  lust  in  itself 
and  for  itself  is  known,  and  even  so  with 
a  vast  difference,  only  among  those  ani- 
mals domesticated  by  man,  who,  artificially 
fed  and  unnaturally  conditioned,  suffer 
a  perversion  such  as  is  found  in  horrible 
excess  among  corrupted,  unredeemed  hu- 
manity.* 

*  Professor  Wallace  has  pointed  out  that  the  cruelty 
of  the  cat  towards  a  mouse  is  the  result  of  domestica- 
tion. If  the  cat  were  hunting  for  food  in  a  wild  state, 
she  would  kill   the   mouse   with   one   blow   and   eat  it 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     35 

Does  not  this  knowledge  at  least  give 
pause  to  your  cynicism,  does  it  not  set  a 
question  at  the  door  of  your  ignorance 
which  your  soul,  suffocating  and  exhausted 
to  the  point  of  death,  struggles  to  answer? 

Look  on  the  earth  and  see  for  yourself. 
Leave  your  books,  your  newspapers,  your 
plays,  your  habits  of  a  lifetime,  and  con- 
sider this  wild  garden  of  creation  as  it 
presents  itself  to  man's  contemplation, 
even  in  this  day,  with  the  freshness,  the 
beauty,  and  the  sanctity  of  a  divine  love. 
What  is  it  that  you  see  there,  first  and 
foremost!— is  it  not  the  mighty,  unending 
and  superb  effort  of  reproduction  conse- 
crated by  the  devotion  and  self-sacrifice  of 
Maternity,  innocent  of  lust?  Where  do 
you  find  among  the  creatures  of  the  earth 
a  vile  and  perverted  thing  like  a  fallen 
woman?  WTiere  do  you  find  among  the 
animals  a  search  after  lust  in  itself  and 
for  itself?    Where  do  you  find  among  the 

immediately.     She  only  plays  with  the  mouse  because 
she  is  not  hungry. 


ly 


36  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

creatures  liigliest  in  the  scale  of  being  an 
indifference  to  maternity? 

Take  this  truth  into  your  soul  and  see 
where  it  will  lead  you — Purity  is  natural, 
Impurity  is  non-natural. 

But  you  have  an  objection  ready  to  your 
mind,  bom  of  that  base,  ignorant,  and  shal- 
low cynicism  which  speaks  of  '^  the  oldest 
profession  in  the  world,''  which  delights 
to  ascribe  to  women  all  the  sins  and  evil 
of  mankind.  You  turn  from  nature,  and 
you  point  to  the  cities  of  the  world. 
Women  are  thus  and  thus.  They  have 
been  so  from  ancient  times.  There  is  no 
literature  in  the  world  that  does  not  depict 
them  in  these  scarlet  colors. 

Do  not  forget,  at  the  outset,  that  the 
written  histories  of  great  men  are  only  the 
sequels  to  the  unwritten  lives  of  good 
mothers.  Do  not  forget  that  from  the  be- 
ginning, and  in  every  literature  of  the 
world,  virtuous  women  have  existed,  have 
been  reverenced,  have  been  exalted  even 
by    poets    who    saw    no    sin    in    lechery. 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     37 

Do  not  forget  that  men  have  ever  been 
shamed  by  vicious  mothers,  that  no  man 
who  ever  lived  has  yet  gloried  in  having 
a  Messalina  for  his  mother,  a  Lais  for  his 
sister,  a  Jezebel  for  his  wife.  Do  not  for- 
get these  things  when  you  speak  of  ''  the 
oldest  profession,''  and  point  to  the 
streets  of  cities  and  the  intrigues  of  society 
to  vindicate  your  contention  that  women 
are  naturally  vicious. 

But  I  meet  you  where  you  stand,  and  I 
challenge  you  on  that  very  ground.  The 
streets  of  great  cities  are  thronged  by  these 
fallen  women,  and  society  is  honeycombed, 
as  it  were  with  some  cancerous  disease,  by 
the  creeping  social  poison  of  adultery. 
Yet  you  will  find  that  women  are  thus, 
after  centuries  of  servility,  chiefly  because 
men  have  driven  them  into  infamy.  Be 
not  deceived;  women  are  what  men  have 
forced  them  to  be,  what  men  wish  them  to 
be,  when  necessity  urges,  they  make  pre- 
tence to  he  what  men  desire  them  to  he. 
The  most  tragic  example  of  this  universal 


38  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

truth  is  to  be  found  in  the  awful  commerce 
of  harlotry;  it  is  known  by  those  who  work 
among  these  fallen  women  that  they  toil 
broken-hearted  at  this  unthinkable  trade, 
hating  the  hideous  debauchery  of  their 
bodies,  masking  their  frightful  ennui  and 
their  spiritual  disgust,  deceiving  brutal 
men  (because  it  pays  them)  into  the  delu- 
sion that  they  are  thus  because  their  na- 
tures are  thus.  With  overwhelming  force 
and  shattering  rebuke  this  terrible  argu- 
ment strikes  the  mouth  of  the  man  who 
hugs  to  his  heart  the  defiling  delusion  that 
women  are  vile,  even  as  he  himself  is  vile. 
The  harlot  acts  a  lust  she  never  feels. 

And  among  those  faithless  women  who 
deceive  their  husbands  and  desecrate  their 
motherhood,  how  many  are  there  who 
would  not  a  thousand  times  rather  possess 
husbands  they  could  love  and  reverence, 
children  whom  they  could  look  fairly  and 
purely  in  the  face?  How  many  of  these 
married  courtesans,  in  spite  of  the  unnatu- 
ral conditions  of  their  lives,  in  spite  of  the 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     39 

deadness  bred  in  their  souls  by  the  rush  of 
social  excitement,  are  really  and  perma- 
nently vicious!  Perhaps  three,  perhaps 
two,  perhaps  one  in  a  hundred. 

Look  the  truth  of  existence  in  the  face. 
Your  eyes  deceive  you  when  you  watch 
sunrise  and  sunset ;  men  lived  for  millions 
of  years  surrounded  by  magnetic  currents 
without  knowledge  of  electricity;  is  it  not 
possible  that  your  corrupt  heart  deceives 
you  about  the  nature  of  women? 

This  is  the  great  delusion  of  base  and 
frivolous  minds,  that  women  are  by  nature 
light  of  love,  that  they  are  not  by  nature 
and  instinct  and  desire  as  pure  as  the 
purest  mother.  And  there  is  no  way  of 
changing  man's  attitude  towards  woman, 
outside  the  redeeming  influence  of  religion, 
so  strong  and  so  convincing  as  the  spread 
and  increase  of  this  one  idea: — Purity  is 
natural ;  impurity  is  unnatural. 

Women  are  by  nature  chaste;  the  reg- 
nant passion  of  a  woman's  heart  is  ma- 
ternity. 


40  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

All  the  bad  and  wicked  women  in  tlie 
world  are  perversions;  all  the  frivolous, 
prurient,  and  immodest  women  of  society- 
are  the  artificial  productions  of  unnatural 
conditions.    The  good  mother  is  the  norm. 

Purity,  then,  is  not  something  to  which 
mankind  must  reach  forward;  it  is  some- 
thing to  which  mankind  must  go  back. 
Impurity  is  not  something  which  rose  from 
the  slime  with  the  first  parents  of  the 
human  race;  it  is  a  disease  which  human- 
ity has  contracted  on  its  departure  from 
nature.  The  harlot  does  not  exist  as  a 
survival  of  human  origin;  she  is  of  all 
things  on  earth  the  most  unnatural,  th^ 
most  lawless,  and  the  most  solitary.  Every 
phase  of  lust  is  a  perversion  of  natural, 
rightful,  and  beautiful  passion. 

If  women  are  to  become  the  great 
mothers  of  a  great  posterity,  man  must 
change  his  attitude  towards  them.  If  life 
is  to  be  better  and  grander,  women  must 
be  better  and  grander;  and  for  women  to 
be  better  and  grander  man  must  desire 


DOMINANT  PASSION  OF  WOMEN     41 

them  to  be  better  and  grander.  Women 
will  be  what  men  wish  them  to  be;  to 
change  women  we  must  convert  the  atti- 
tude of  men  towards  women. 

All  social  progress  leans  upon  this  al- 
teration of  men^s  attitude  towards  women. 
The  aim  of  religion  and  of  politics  is 
Brotherhood ;  but  you  cannot  have  Brother- 
hood without  Motherhood. 


IV 

THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL 

THERE  is  in  the  world  at  the  present 
time,  underlying  all  our  seriousness 
and  frivolity,  all  our  heroics  and 
cynicism,  a  deadly  disease  of  impurity. 
It  is  so  widely  diffused,  so  deeply  fastened 
into  the  vitals  of  the  community,  that 
those  physicians  of  the  social  state  who 
strive  to  save  the  soul  of  humanity,  and 
who  best  know  the  world's  health,  almost 
despair  of  a  cure.  This  dreadful  leprosy 
of  unnatural  impurity,  taking  a  hundred 
forms,  is  creeping  through  the  whole  body 
of  the  state,  in  its  violent  and  most  deadly 
shape  is  attacking  even  some  of  those  who 
are  guardians  of  religion.  For  every  scan- 
dal, and  for  every  suppressed  scandal,  men 
who  know  the  truth  of  this  matter  are 

43 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        43 

aware  of  twenty  cases  worse  and  worse. 
Some  malignant  enchantment  seems  to  be 
thro^^^l  over  the  minds  of  mankind  by  this 
devil  of  impurity,  so  that  those  who  are 
honorable  in  all  things  else,  who  are  lovers 
of  beanty,  who  are  followers  of  religion, 
and  who  shrink  from  ugliness  or  coarse- 
ness with  most  honest  horror,  pitch  head- 
long into  the  deepest  infamy  of  all.  And 
men  who  would  not  break  their  word  to  a 
man,  who  are  trusted  and  liked  and  ad- 
mired by  a  circle  of  honorable  men,  will 
yet  creep  into  the  shameful  places  of  the 
town  to  buy  at  all  costs  the  ruin  of  a  child.* 
If  it  were  possible  to  tell  the  tale  of 
these  things,  such  a  book  might  be  writ- 
ten as  would  lacerate  the  soul  of  Christen- 
dom. Horror  could  be  piled  upon  horror, 
bestiality  upon  bestiality,  devilry  upon 
devilry,  until  the  accumulated  vileness  of 
mortality  would  draw  a  scream  of  protest 

*  In  my  ovm  experience  I  know  of  a  little  child,  four 
years  of  age,  who  was  kept  for  immoral  purposes  in  a 
house  of  ill-fame.  This  babe  was  rescued  by  a  lady,  but 
was  kidnapped  again,  and  has  never  been  heard  of  since. 


U  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

from  tlie  pure.  If  the  conscience  of  the 
civilized  world  was  shocked  by  revelations 
concerning  the  slave  trade,  or  by  the  bar- 
barities of  the  factory  system  in  days  be- 
fore factory  legislation,  how  much  more 
should  it  be  shocked  by  these  revelations 
of  the  soul  of  man  in  the  sphere  of  mortal 
apostasy?  Nor  would  these  horrors  be 
drawn  only  from  the  pit  of  Acheron,  from 
the  demoniacal  perversions  of  creatures  so 
cankered  of  soul  that  the  putrefaction  of 
their  immoralities  is  like  the  blight  and 
corruption  of  death;  they  would  be  drawn 
from  every  section  of  society,  from  such 
different  arms  of  our  national  existence  as 
the  Navy  and  the  Priesthood,  from  the 
most  famous  schools,  from  the  most  re- 
spectable circles  of  society,  from  every 
rank  and  condition  of  mankind.  More  than 
this :  a  society  of  fashionable  women  might 
be  named  which  exists  for  feminine  de- 
pravity, which  is  organized  for  its  in- 
credible horrors,  even  as  the  White  Slave 
Traffic  is  organized  throughout  the  world. 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL         45 

More  even  than  this :  men  might  be  named 
in  religion  who  have  received  preferment 
in  spite  of  notorious  reputations, — a 
Cabinet  Minister  once  denounced  in  my 
hearing,  and  before  a  group  of  men,  a  cer- 
tain clergyman,  calling  him  by  the  hardest 
and  most  brutal  name  an  evil  beast  can 
earn,  and  that  clergyman  has  since  been 
promoted  to  a  more  conspicuous  sphere  of 
labor. 

But  I  need  not  hint  and  suggest  at  things 
which  every  man  of  the  world  knows  full 
well.  Though  every  spluttering  sycophant 
of  the  age  and  every  adjusting,  tolerant, 
and  fruitless  philosopher  should  strive  to 
dismiss  my  charge  as  exaggerated,  those 
who  truly  know  the  condition  of  modern 
society,  those  who  are  veritably  acquainted 
with  the  iniquities  of  the  time  will  ac- 
knowledge that  these  hints  and  suggestions 
give  no  adequate  adumbration  of  the 
blackness  hidden  and  concealed  behind  the 
decent  candles  of  hypocrisy.  And  let  a 
clean-hearted,  healthy-minded  man  declare 


46  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

whether  there  is  not  evidence  overwhelm- 
ing enough  of  this  age 's  prurience  in  things 
which  are  publicly  done  and  publicly 
tolerated.  What  an  indictment  against 
our  minds  might  be  brought  even  from 
placards  and  advertisements:  what  proof 
that  we  regard  woman  only  from  one  single 
point  of  view  might  be  adduced  from  plays 
and  novels :  what  a  commentary  on  our  re- 
ligious and  social  life  might  be  found  in 
the  fashion  of  women's  garments,  the 
amusements  of  society,  and  the  windows  of 
shops. 

I  will  take  but  one  example, — simple, 
commonplace,  and  therefore,  the  most  con- 
venient for  my  purpose.  During  the  last 
few  years  the  billboards  of  nearly  every 
city  in  the  land  have  exhibited  a  commer- 
cial advertisement,  which  represents  the 
kiss  of  a  man  and  woman, — a  kiss  of  sur- 
render and  abandonment.  Now,  these  pic- 
tures are  known  by  every  honest  man  and 
woman  to  be  impure.  But  let  any  one  raise 
his  voice  against  such  exhibitions,  and  the 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        47 

great    newspapers    are   silent,    while    the 
baser  newspapers — usually  connected  with 
some  pander  of  the  racing  world — immedi- 
ately raise  a  shout  against  ''  Puritanism," 
crying  out  that  to  the  pure  all  things  are 
pure,  gartering  themselves  with  the  chiv- 
alry of  Edward  the  Third,  and  heaping 
upon  the  critic  every  term  of  disdainful 
and   contemptuous   opprobrium   to  which 
their  addled  intellects  can  reach.    But  in 
spite  of  this  transpontine  hypocrisy,  every 
one  knows  perfectly  well  that  the  adver- 
tisement is  there  to  catch  attention,  and 
that  the  purpose  of  the  advertiser  is  to 
catch  attention  by  appealing  to  a  powerful 
human  instinct.     There  is  just  as  much 
prurience  and  calculated  lechery  in  such 
advertisements  as  in  the  songs  and  dances 
of  an  Indian  temple-girl.     The  appeal  is 
deliberately    made    to     animal    passion. 
Every    one    knows    this,    and    there    it 
is. 

Now,  I  mil  not  ask  why  a  man  who  has 
brought  up  his  daughters  in  pure,  beauti- 


48  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

ful,  and  refined  surroundings,  should  suf- 
fer in  bis  excursions  through  the  streets 
these  public  affronts  to  their  modesty,  nor 
will  I  inquire  what  effects  such  exhibitions 
are  likely  to  produce  in  the  minds  of  un- 
happy boys  fighting  in  the  sweat  of  their 
soul  against  the  evil  tendencies  of  over- 
civilized  human  nature.  My  purpose  in 
citing  this  particular  impurity  of  the  bill- 
boards is  to  charge  the  age  with  a  lack  of 
decency,  with  a  want  of  modesty.  I  say 
that  here,  in  a  very  plain,  public,  and  defi- 
nite instance,  is  demonstrable  proof  that 
we  are  losing  that  essential  reticence  and 
that  necessary  restraint  in  the  moral 
sphere  which  characterize  a  pure,  chival- 
rous, and  dignified  attitude  towards 
woman.  The  kiss  of  man  and  woman 
where  it  is  pure,  is  sacred ;  where  it  is  im- 
pure, it  is  as  vile  as  hell  is  itself. 
To  make  public  exhibitions  of  a  pure  kiss 
is  like  a  blasphemy:  it  is  like  using  the 
Eucharist  for  an  advertisement;  to  make 
public  exhibitions  of  an  impure  kiss  is  an 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        49 

obscenity:  it  is  like  opening  a  sewer  to 
attract  the  flies. 

Let  the  Philistines  and  the  tolerant 
'*  clinkered  souls  '^  of  our  baser  journal- 
ism say  what  they  will,  these  apparently 
simple,  apparently  innocuous,  and  appar- 
ently innocent  advertisements  are  symp- 
toms of  moral  decay.  They  witness  to  an 
itching  and  an  inflamed  condition  of  that 
part  of  man's  nature  which  it  is  one  of 
the  highest  interests  of  civilization  to 
keep  purged  and  clean.  They  prove  that 
reticence  in  sexual  matters  is  at  the  be- 
ginning of  an  abandonment  whose  logical 
development  is  towards  animalism.  If  a 
kiss  may  be  exhibited,  everything  may  be 
exhibited.  A  man,  Coleridge  teaches,  can- 
not stop  at  the  animal ;  if  he  is  not  moving 
onward  to  be  an  angel  he  is  moving  back- 
ward to  be  a  devil.  These  veiled  and  mas- 
querading impurities  of  the  billboards  do 
not  witness  to  progression,  but  to  retro- 
gression :  their  most  lustful  defenders  mil 
not  asseverate  that  they  mark  an  advance 


60  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

towards  spiritual  greatness :  the  most  care- 
less, the  most  tolerant,  the  most  lazy  will 
not  deny  that  they  are  animal  in  origin  and 
design.  Where  will  they  lead  ?  If  they  are 
suffered,  what  will  be  the  next  backward 
step? 

Suppose  this  want  of  reticence  and  re- 
straint— obvious  in  certain  advertise- 
ments, in  certain  plays,  in  certain  novels, 
in  the  grotesqueries  of  women's  gar- 
ments— proceeds  unchallenged  and  un- 
checked. Suppose  we  come  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  no  curtain  should  remain  on  its 
rings,  no  door  should  be  kept  locked,  no 
veil  should  be  drawn  over  the  privacies  of 
human  nature?  Suppose  we  agree  that 
each  man  is  a  law  unto  himself,  that  life 
is  an  opportunity  for  sensual  enjoyment, 
that  not  a  single  individual  amongst 
us  owes  allegiance  to  God  or  responsi- 
bility to  posterity.  What  will  be  the 
end? 

The  end  will  be  that  chief  horror  which 
has  affrighted  philosophy  and  terrified  re- 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        51 

ligion.  It  will  be  a  world  organized  for 
evil. 

The  husbandman  sows  wheat  and  tares 
come  up  with  it ;  but  when  the  husbandman 
sows  tares,  where  shall  men  look  for  the 
bread  of  life! 

Till  now,  mankind  has  held  that  virtue  is 
higher  than  vice,  that  love  and  sacrifice 
are  holier  emotions  than  self-assertion  and 
self-indulgence,  that  purity  and  modesty 
are  graces  of  the  soul  which  are  more 
seemly  and  which  more  uplift  humanity 
than  all  the  swinish  propulsions  of  our 
animal  nature.  But  now  it  has  become 
bombastic  and  clap-trap  to  speak  of  duty; 
for  a  young  girl  flung  into  the  swirl  of 
society,  modesty  and  reticence  are  weights 
that  sink  her  out  of  sight ;  to  be  impudent, 
to  be  immodest,  to  be  daring,  to  be  utterly 
and  completely  self -minded — this  is  to  float 
on  the  surface  and  attract  the  iridescent 
scum.  Life  is  regarded  as  something  less 
than  a  game — it  is  a  jig  and  a  spree.  To 
think  only  of  oneself,  to  have  ^'  a  good 


52  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

time/^  to  be  free  of  responsibilities,  to 
stand  clear  of  duty,  to  avoid  seriousness, 
to  laugh,  to  dance,  to  push,  to  jostle,  and 
to  chatter  the  gospel  of  solipsism  in  a  maze 
of  sensual  distractions, — this  is  to  be  mod- 
ern, this  is  to  be  abreast  of  the  times.  And 
from  the  coarseness  of  plutocracy,  this 
spirit  descends  through  the  middle-classes 
and  the  suburbs  to  the  sphere  of  the  hum- 
blest people.  Family  life  is  no  longer  the 
central  happiness  of  humanity.  A  child  is 
no  longer  counted  the  supreme  blessing  of 
human  existence.  Home  is  ceasing  to  be 
the  anchorage  of  mankind.  The  birth-rate 
falls  like  a  weather-glass  under  a  lowering 
sky. 

Look  where  you  will  the  spirit  of  ^'  I 
•Myself  ''  is  paramount.  Life  exists  for 
Me :  all  the  dim  aeons  behind  have  toiled  to 
produce  Me :  this  brief  moment  in  the  eter- 
nal duration  of  time  is  only  an  opportunity 
for  My  pleasure  and  My  ease :  I  care  not  a 
jot  for  the  ages  ahead  and  the  sons  of  men 
who  shall  inhabit  the  earth  when  I  am  dust 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        53 

beneath  their  feet.  Give  Me  My  Eights. 
Stand  clear  of  My  way.  t  want,  and  I  will 
have. 

Is  it  not  clear  to  you  from  this  spirit  of 
the  age — manifest  with  brutal  coarseness 
here,  with  subtlety  and  refinement  there — 
that  the  hour  of  ^^  the  stern  encounter  '* 
is  approaching!  *^  The  stern  encounter 
when  two  real  and  living  principles,  sim- 
ple, entire,  and  consistent,  one  in  the 
Church  and  the  other  out  of  it,  at  length 
rush  upon  each  other,  contending  not  for 
names  and  words,  or  half  views,  but  for 
elementary  notions  and  distinctive  moral 
character. '^ 

If  you  think  that  this  encounter  is  not  at 
hand,  that  virtue  is  still  safe,  that  one  need 
not  alarm  oneself  unduly,  reflect  for  a  mo- 
ment on  the  revolution  in  dancing,  and  the 
revolution  in  man's  attitude  towards  this 
social  diversion.  Consider  that  even  those 
critics  who  laugh  at  the  Puritan's  disap- 
proval of  sexual  dancing  are  forced  to  con- 
demn the  modern  dances  which  frankly 


54.  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

and  shamelessly  seek  to  imitate  the  bodily 
passions  of  birds  and  animals.  Think 
what  it  means  that  these  filthy  and  las- 
civious dances  are  tolerated  in  private 
houses,  that  they  are  laughed  at  and  cari- 
catured in  the  newspapers  as  though  they 
were  merely  an  absurdity  of  fashion! 
Does  this  not  strike  you  as  a  symptom  of 
real  decadence,  a  sure  sign  that  modesty 
and  restraint  are  no  longer  respected,  a 
certain  proof  that  Christ's  spiritual  purity 
of  the  heart  is  not  even  taken  into  consid- 
eration by  the  world? 

I  will  quote  in  this  place  a  paragraph 
from  a  recent  number  of  The  Observer, 
a  Sunday  paper,  and  a  paper  that  is  read 
by  the  most  literate,  refined,  and  serious 
classes.  It  will  be  seen  that  this  paper 
describes  a  reply  to  a  distinguished  clergy- 
man's rebuke  of  immoral  dancing  as  ''  an 
amusing  article  " — amusing! — and  that 
the  article  in  question,  while  objecting  on 
the  score  of  taste  to  the  most  disgusting  of 
sexual  dances,  is  in  truth  a  light,  flippant. 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        55 

cynical,  and  shallow  reproof  to  the  * '  Puri- 
tans ": — 


MoKALs  OF  Dancing. 

**  THE  MOST  HAEEMISH  OF  PASTIMES.'' 

Canon  Newbolt's  sermon  against  de- 
cadent dancing  is  the  theme  of  an  amus- 
ing article  in  the  New  Statesman,  which, 
premising  '  the  history  of  human  prog- 
ress might  be  interpreted  as  a  prolonged 
conflict  between  the  preachers  and  danc- 
ers,' goes  on: — 

*'  It  is  not  difficult  to  see  the  reason 
why  the  preachers  are  so  doubtful  about 
the  dancers.  It  is  simply  that  dancing 
is  for  the  most  part  a  rhythmical  panto- 
mime of  sex.  It  is  the  most  haremish  of 
pastimes.  We  are  not  surprised  to  learn 
that  Henry  VIII.  was  the  most  expert 
of  Koyal  dancers.  He  was  an  enthusiast 
for  the  kissing  dances  of  his  day,  indeed, 
long  before  ever  he  had  abandoned  his 


56  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

youtliful  straitness  for  the  moral  code 
of  a  farmyard  that  had  gone  off  its  head. 
We  can  imagine  how  a  preacher  with 
his  craft  at  his  fingers'  ends  could  de- 
duce Henry's  downfall  from  those  first 
delicate  trippings.  .    .    . 

^*  What,  then,  is  a  reasonable  attitude 
to  adopt  towards  sex  dancing?  Obvi- 
ously, we  cannot  abolish  sex,  even  if  we 
wished  to  do  so.  And,  if  we  try  to  chain 
it  up,  it  will  merely  become  crabbed  like 
a  dog.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  all  the 
difference  in  the  world  between  putting 
a  dog  on  a  chain  and  encouraging  it  to 
go  mad  and  bite  half  the  parish.  There 
is  nearly  as  wide  a  distance  separating 
the  courtly  dances  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury from  the  cake-walk,  and  the  apache 
dance  from  the  Irish  reel.  Priests,  we 
know,  in  whom  the  gift  of  preaching  has 
turned  sour,  have  been  as  severe  on  in- 
nocent as  on  furious  dances.  But  this 
is  merely  an  exaggeration  of  the  prevail- 
ing sense  of  mankmd  that  sex  is  a  wild 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        57 

animal  and  most  difficult  to  tame  into  a 
fireside  pet. 

"■  It  is  upon  the  civilization  of  this  ani- 
mal, none  the  less,  though  not  upon  the 
butchering  of  it,  that  the  decencies  of 
the  world  depend.  And  this  is  exercise 
for  a  hero,  for  the  animal  in  question 
has  a  desperate  tendency  to  revert  to 
type.  One  noticed  how  the  eye  bulged 
with  the  memory  of  African  forests 
when  the  cake-walk  affronted  the  sun  a 
few  years  ago.  The  cake-walk,  we  ad- 
mit, seemed  a  right  and  rapturous  thing 
enough  when  it  was  danced  by  those  in 
whose  veins  was  the  recent  blood  of 
Africa.  But  when  young  gentlemen  be- 
gan to  introduce  it  as  a  figure  in  the 
lancers  in  suburban  back-parlors  one  re- 
sented it,  not  merely  as  an  emasculated 
parody,  but  as  an  act  of  dishonest  inno- 
cence. 

**  But  everywhere  it  has  been  the  tend- 
ency of  dancing  in  recent  years  to  be- 
come more  noisily  sexual.     We  do  not 


58  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

refer,  as  might  be  imagined,  to  the  danc- 
ing in  undress  which  for  a  time  captured 
the  music-halls.  That,  we  believe,  is 
almost  the  least  sexual  dancing  we  have 
had.  The  dancing  of  Isidora  Duncan 
was  of  as  good  report  as  a  painting  of 
old  Sir  Joshua.  We  may  pass  over  the 
Russian  ballet,  too,  because  of  the  art 
which  often  raised  it  to  beauty,  though  it 
amuses  one  to  speculate  what  St.  Ber- 
nard would  have  thought  of  Nijinsky. 
But,  as  for  ragtime,  it  is  a  silly  madness, 
a  business  for  Maenads  of  both  sexes; 
and  all  those  gesticulations  of  the  human 
frame  known  as  bunny-hugs,  turkey- 
trots,  and  the  rest  of  it  are  condemned 
by  their  very  names  as  tolerable  only  in 
the  menagerie. 

*^  On  the  other  hand,  because  the 
bunny  in  man  and  the  turkey  in  woman 
have  revived  themselves  with  such  im- 
pudence, are  we  to  get  out  our  guns 
against  dancing  I  Far  from  it.  One  is 
not  going  to  sacrifice  the  flowery  grace 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  E\IL        59 

of  Genee,  or  Pavlova,  with  her  genius  of 
the  butterflies,  because  of  the  multitude 
of  fools.  All  we  can  do  is  to  insist  upon 
the  recognition  of  the  fact  that  dancing 
may  be  good  or  bad,  as  eggs  are  good 
or  bad,  and  to  remind  the  world  that  in 
dancing,  as  in  eggs,  freshness  is  even 
more  beautiful  than  decadence.  Per- 
haps some  of  the  performances  of  the 
Eussian  ballet  would  come  off  limping 
from  such  a  test.  Opinions  will  differ 
about  that.  In  any  case,  we  cannot  help 
the  logic  of  our  belief.  Each  of  us, 
no  doubt,  contains  something  of  the 
preacher  and  something  of  the  dancer; 
and  our  enthusiasms  depend  upon  which 
of  the  two  is  dominant  in  us.'' 

Is  there  not  in  the  whole  spirit  of  this 
extract,  so  patronizing  and  superior  to 
religion,  so  generous  and  indulgent  to 
**  the  most  haremish  of  pastimes,''  clear 
witness  that  morality  no  longer  exercises 
authentic  sway  in  public  opinion?     **  It 


60  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

amuses  one  to  speculate  what  St.  Bernard 
would  have  thought.  ..."  But  there  is 
a  higher  than  St.  Bernard.  What  does 
Christ  think?  Are  we  to  stop  our  amusing 
speculations  at  St.  Bernard?  Apparently, 
yes.  The  religious  aspect  is  merely  to  be 
glanced  at,  and  only  then  in  a  moment  of 
amusement.  *^  What,  then,  is  a  reasonable 
attitude  towards  sex  in  dancing?  " 

Not  in  this  spirit  would  our  fathers  have 
written  of  dances  which  are  loathsome  to 
the  point  of  nausea,  inhuman  to  the  point 
of  devilry.  A  healthy  mind  sickens  at 
these  lascivious  things,  a  religious  mind 
shudders  with  something  deeper  than  dis- 
gust. They  are  not  only  insolent  and 
dirty-minded,  they  are  a  blasphemous 
mockery  of  Gethsemane,  a  devilish  and 
most  blasphemous  derision  of  Calvary. 
Christ  is  not  a  character  in  fiction,  not  a 
tradition  in  art,  not  a  convention  in 
morals ;  He  is  the  great  and  central  Reality 
of  human  existence.  He  lived.  He  suf- 
fered, and  He  died  for  man.    Brought  into 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL         61 

the  light  of  that  Incarnation,  how  can  men 
of  reason  look  upon  these  dances  except 
with  utmost  horror  and  indignant  shame? 
Are  they  not  blasphemous  and  infernal? 
Nevertheless,  it  is  not  so  much  these  mock- 
ing and  derisive  orgies  of  sex  which  startle 
us  and  fill  us  with  apprehension;  it  is 
rather  the  spirit  of  public  opinion  which 
tolerates  and  accepts  them  so  easily,  which 
can  write  about  them  in  respectable  news- 
papers *^  amusingly, ''  and  which  seeks 
^\ith  indulgent  smile  to  discover  the  * '  rea- 
sonable attitude  ''  towards  them.* 

What  most  astonishes,  perhaps,  is  that 
no  one  seems  to  be  ashamed  of  these  popu- 
lar lecheries.  There  is  no  scandal  about 
them.  No  sense  of  horror  or  guilt.  Even 
those  who  disapprove  never  regard  them 
from  the  religious  standpoint  which  re- 
veals them  in  their  naked  and  rampant 
lasciviency.  These  shocking  and  abomi- 
nable   exhibitions    of    unchastity,    which 

*  It  has  just  been  announced  that  a  new  club  is  to  be 
opened  in  London  for  dancing,  a  club  which  will  be  open 
all  night  as  well  as  all  day. 


62  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

should  call  the  whole  Church  to  arms,  are 
really  no  more  intolerable  to  public  opin- 
ion than  a  folly  in  women's  dress. 

And  it  is,  of  course,  to  this  perilous  con- 
dition of  public  opinion,  rather  than  to  the 
actual  things  themselves,  that  I  would  di- 
rect the  reflection  of  the  reader.  I  am  not 
so  much  horrified  and  disgusted  by  the 
dirty-minded  photographs  which  have  ap- 
peared so  continuously  in  the  popular 
newspapers  this  summer — one  respectable 
paper  exhibited  a  picture  of  a  man  peer- 
ing through  the  keyhole  into  a  woman's 
bathroom — nor  am  I  so  horrified  and  dis- 
gusted by  these  haremish  dances,  by  the 
immodesty  of  pictorial  advertisements,  by 
the  prurience  of  feminine  fashions,  by  the 
presence  of  fallen  women  and  painted  boys 
in  the  public  streets;  what  chiefly  disturbs 
me  is  the  absence  of  public  protest,  the 
quiescence  of  the  public  mind,  the  silence 
and  the  inaction  of  public  opinion. 

Plain  and  staring  is  the  presence  in  our 
midst  of  this  ruttish  and  bawdy  disease  of 


THE  TOLERANCE  OF  EVIL        63 

Impurity:  obviously  and  beyond  dispute 
this  age  is  ridden  by  the  obsession  of  sex 
to  an  extraordinary  degree:  frankly  and 
without  justification  commerce  and  art 
trade  publicly  on  this  moral  decadence; — 
and  nothing  of  a  great,  national,  and  re- 
ligious character  is  even  attempted  in 
counteraction.  This  is  the  peril.  This  is 
the  indictment.  Man's  pure  and  beautiful 
Ideal  of  Womanhood  is  dragged  down  into 
the  middens  of  prostitution,  the  Queen  of 
Earth  is  strumpeted  for  a  pastime, 
Motherhood  is  without  sanctity  and  with- 
out reverence,  the  whole  world  turns  itself 
for  amusement  to  the  dishonoring  and  the 
degrading  of  Woman;  and  public  opinion 
is  unmoved.  There  is  not  even  a  cry  of 
pain. 

Our  condition  is  the  condition  of  the  Ro- 
mans described  by  St.  Paul.  We  are  de- 
livered over  to  ''  the  sway  of  infamous 
passions  ''  to  *^  the  promptings  of  a  mind 
abandoned  to  itself,'^  we  pervert  the  natu- 
ral function,  we  are  '^  set  ablaze  with  lust- 


64  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

ful  passions/'  we  are  abandoned  ^^  to  the 

perpetration  of  hideous  sins/' 

''  So  the  God  whom  they  had  bestial- 
ized  abandoned  them,  sunk  as  they  were 
in  the  lusts  of  their  own  hearts,  to  the 
thraldom  of  impurity,  till  they  bestial- 
ized  themselves  with  one  another," 

It  is  the  hour  of  the  Beast. 


A  CRISIS  BETWEEN  GOOD  AND 

EVIL 

HITHERTO  in  the  modern  history 
of  mankind  evil  has  never  had  a 

majority  on  the  council  of  public 
opinion.  The  long  heredity  of  religion  has 
exercised  in  the  souls  of  men,  however 
tolerant  or  base  they  may  have  been,  an 
influence  tending  towards  respect  for  vir- 
tue. Thus  it  has  come  to  pass  that  rever- 
sions to  barbarism  have  been  rare  among 
nations,  and  that  the  story  of  the  human 
race,  after  the  foreword  of  Christianity,  is, 
for  the  most  part,  a  tale  of  progress  in  re- 
spectability. 

But  there  are  signs  that  this  quiescence 
and  passivity  on  the  part  of  evil  are  com- 
ing to  an  end.    Political  individualism,  and 

**  65 


ee  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

even  religious  individualism,  seem  to  be 
working  themselves  out,  but  moral  indi- 
vidualism is  thrusting  itself  into  a  vigorous 
existence.  Men  and  women  publicly  jus- 
tify conduct  which  has  incurred  the  censure 
of  mankind  for  thousands  of  years,  the 
most  brilliant  and  admired  of  our  modern 
writers  preach  the  gospel  that  every  man 
should  do  what  he  wants  to  do,  that  re- 
sistance to  natural  impulse  is  nothing 
more  than  timidity:  the  spirit  of  the  age 
is  a  spirit  of  liberty  without  restraint, 
egoism  without  conscience,  life  without 
God. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  prophesy  the  end  of 
this  development.  If  each  man  is  to  be  a 
law  unto  himself  in  the  moral  sphere,  if 
individualism  is  to  consult  the  lusts  of  its 
own  flesh  and  not  the  universal  voice  of 
historical  conscience,  if  human  life  is  to 
be  organized  by  the  State  without  refer- 
ence of  any  kind  to  God,  then  for  a  cer- 
tainty civilization  will  perish.  I  do  not 
mean  that  it  will  perish  in  an  orgie  of  sen- 


CRISIS  BETWEEN  GOOD  AND  EVIL     67 

sualism,  or  that  the  most  contagious  of 
diseases  will  eat  it  out  of  existence,  or  that 
there  will  be  any  violence  of  revolution, 
any  political  cataclysm,  any  dramatic  and 
pictorial  event  comparable  with  the 
French  Revolution.  I  mean  that  the  civil- 
ized nations  will  perish  at  the  heart,  that 
their  populations  will  fall  as  a  stone  falls 
to  the  earth,  that  their  manhood  will  be 
feeble  and  ineffectual,  that  their  woman- 
hood will  be  artificial,  that  their  life  will 
be  without  purpose  and  without  drive. 

And  no  man  who  is  honest  and  unpreju- 
diced will  dispute  that  animalism  has  a 
just  right  to  preach  its  gospel  and  organ- 
ize the  life  of  the  nation  to  suit  its  real  and 
living  principle,  if  we  abandon  faith  in 
God.  Nor  can  it  be  doubted  that  the  pres- 
ent organization  of  society  frustrates  ani- 
malism and  is  inimical  to  evil.  Therefore 
the  salvation  of  humanity  lies  absolutely 
in  God.  Rescind  the  divine  hypothesis,  set 
democracy  to  think  only  of  physical  well- 
being,  educate  that  democracy  to  believe  in 


68  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

the  naturalness  of  lust  and  the  right,  nay 
the  duty,  of  every  individual  to  extract 
from  animal  existence  as  much  animal 
pleasure  as  he  can  comfortably  assimi- 
late,— do  this,  and  in  a  generation  you  will 
have  halved  the  population,  you  will  have 
wrecked  flesh  and  blood,  you  will  have 
struck  a  deathblow  at  family  life,  you  will 
have  destroyed  the  vital  instinct  for  tran- 
scendence. 

Newman  was  right  when  he  prophesied 
the  stern  encounter  of  two  real  and  liv- 
ing principles,  contending  for  distinctive 
moral  characters, — ^^  one  in  the  Church 
and  the  other  out  of  it."  It  must  be,  it  can 
only  be  a  conflict  for  the  soul  of  the  world 
between  those  who  believe  in  Christ  and 
those  who  deny  Him. 

How  is  the  Church  prepared?  Those 
who  have  read  Medicevalism,  a  book  which 
exceeds  in  passionate  and  righteous  in- 
dignation, as  it  easily  exceeds  in  intellec- 
tual power  and  spiritual  purity,  even 
Stevenson's   great   scornful   chastisement 


CRISIS  BETWEEN  GOOD  AND  EVIL     69 

of  the  traducer  of  Damien — those  who 
have  read  Medicevalism  know  that  it  is  not 
so  much  an  answer  to  Cardinal  Mercier, 
not  even  a  destruction  of  a  particular 
Papal  encyclical,  not  even  a  magnificent 
justification  of  Modernism,  but  that  it  is 
rather  the  most  solemn  and  terrible  indict- 
ment ever  brought  against  the  Catholic 
Church.  Who  can  forget  the  cry  from 
Tyrrell's  soul  as  he  contemplates  the  his- 
tory of  Christ's  Church  and  sees  centuries 
— whole  centuries — given  up  absolutely  to 
the  madness  of  political  ascendency,  whole 
centuries  spent  in  cunning  treachery  and 
diplomacy  to  compass  the  temporal  tri- 
umph of  the  Vatican  bureaucracy?  Who 
can  forget  the  lamentation  of  his  soul  as 
he  contemplates  this  waste  of  perverted 
power  and  compares  it  with  the  hunger 
and  thirst,  the  wickedness  and  the  sickness 
of  a  world  seeking  shepherdless  for  God? 
The  Church,  he  says,  is  commissioned 
to  teach  what  Christ  taught,  in  the  way 
that  He  taught  it,  and  not  otherwise:  and 


70  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

the  Church  is  commissioned  to  be  what  He 
was,  the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  the  in- 
spiration of  a  new  hope,  the  communica- 
tion of  a  new  strength. 

All  the  world  had  been  Christian  by 
this  time,  he  cries,  had  the  Church  been 
faithful  to  her  divine  commission. 

Is  she  any  nearer  to  the  realization  that 
her  divine  commission — so  manifestly,  so 
unmistakably,  and  so  exquisitely  written 
in  her  earliest  documents — is  to  *^  teach 
and  propagate  a  new  life,  a  new  love,  a  new 
hope,  a  new  spirit  ''? 

With  other  evil  signs  of  the  times,  such 
as  the  falling  birth-rate,  the  spread  of  a 
hideous  disease,  and  the  decay  of  family 
life,  must  be  numbered  the  clerical  com- 
plaint of  empty  churches.  Is  the  cause  of 
this  evil,  the  cause  of  all  other  evils  ? — is  it 
due  to  the  Church's  apostasy?  "  This,'' 
says  Coleridge,  ''  was  the  first  and  true 
apostasy — when  in  Council  and  Synod  the 
Divine  Humanities  of  the  Gospel  gave  way 
to    speculative   systems."    Is   it   because 


CRISIS  BETWEEN  GOOD  AND  EVIL     71 

democracy  has  lost  faith  in  religious  5m- 
cerity?  Is  any  church  empty  where  Chris- 
tianity is  declared  to  be  *^  the  revelation  of 
a  new  life,  the  inspiration  of  a  new  hope, 
the  communication  of  a  new  strength?  " 
Would  any  man  be  dead  to  religion  who 
saw,  visible  and  manifest  in  the  whole 
Church  of  Christ,  the  propagation  of  a 
new  life  and  a  new  love,  a  new  hope  and 
a  new  spirit? 

Let  it  be  as  clear  to  you  as  the  gather- 
ing strength  of  iniquity  that  no  political 
expedient,  no  social  adjustment,  and  no  law 
of  our  land,  however  scientific  and  cour- 
ageous, can  avert  the  stern  encounter  of 
good  and  evil,  or  assure  victory  for  right- 
eousness. It  will  be,  and  it  must  be,  a  con- 
flict between  those  in  the  Church  and  those 
out  of  it,  a  conflict  between  Christ  and 
Antichrist.  The  Church  may  summon  to 
her  aid  the  man  of  science  and  the  poli- 
tician, but  it  is  she  herself  who  must  lead 
the  van  and  get  the  victory.  Nor  must  she 
stand  on  the  defensive,  taking  council  with 


n  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

science  and  politics  as  to  how  she  may 
most  safely  entrench  herself  against  at- 
tack, she  must  rush  upon  the  enemy,  mak- 
ing her  onslaught  in  the  faith  of  a  living 
God  and  in  the  power  of  a  present  Christ. 
It  is  Christ  who  is  attacked  under  all  the 
creeping  guises  of  iniquity,  it  is  the  moral 
character  of  Christianity  that  is  threatened 
by  the  real  and  living  principle  of  evil;  it 
is  the  foundation  of  goodness  that  is  being 
sapped  by  the  hidden  forces  of  Satanism. 
For  the  Church  to  stand  on  guard,  for  re- 
ligion to  lean  upon  science  and  politics,  is 
to  put  heart  into  the  enemy:  defeat  and 
ruin  must  ensue.  A  Church  on  the  de- 
fensive is  a  Church  without  faith,  and  a 
Church  without  faith  is  a  house  built  upon 
sand. 

There  is  no  power  which  can  save  hu- 
manity outside  of  religion:  and  the  living 
religion  of  Christ  not  only  can  save  hu- 
manity from  this  peril  and  from  that,  but 
can  bring  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  on  earth. 
Does  the  Church  apprehend  what  it  means 


CRISIS  BETWEEN  GOOD  AND  EVIL     73^ 

to  bear  the  commission  of  Christ  and  to 
make  herself  in  the  world  ^^  the  revelation 
of  a  new  life,  the  inspiration  of  a  new 
hope,  the  commnnication  of  a  new 
strength  ' '  ? 


iVI 

A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH 

IF  I  were  to  venture  in  this  place  to  com- 
mend a  policy  to  the  Church  whereby 
she  might  draw  into  her  ranks  all  those 
multitudes  of  men  and  women  who  love 
virtue,  but  who  cannot  accept  certain  theo- 
logical interpretations  of  revelation  which 
the  Church  cherishes  as  essential  to  re- 
ligion, I  should  be  led  so  far  away  from  my 
subject,  which  is  a  subject  of  action  rather 
than  of  speculation,  that  this  monograph 
would  end  in  labyrinthine  complexity. 

Nevertheless,  if  it  be  only  in  parentheses, 
I  would  emphasize  the  claim  of  what  is 
called  Modernism  to  be  heard  at  this  hour 
by  all  those  who  are  set  in  authority  over 
the  Church.  I  would  beg  the  Church  as 
it  exists  outside  of  the  Vatican  to  consider 

74 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     75 

the  extreme  urgency  of  drawing  to  her 
side  without  further  parley  every  man  and 
every  woman  who  acknowledges  in  Christ 
a  conjunction  of  Divinity  and  Humanity. 
The  stern  encounter  must  of  necessity  be, 
as  Newman  says,  a  conflict  between  those 
in  the  Church  and  those  out  of  it ;  and  the 
rigid  test  which  may  be  excused  in  time 
of  peace  is  an  inexcusable  madness  of  in- 
tolerance in  time  of  war. 

And  now  I  would  implore  those  who  be- 
lieve that  the  trumpets  are  sounding  for 
battle  to  force  the  enemy  into  such  a  posi- 
tion as  shall  make  the  first  onslaught  turn 
upon  Purity.  In  other  words  I  desire  to 
see  the  Church  lifting  up  in  the  midst  of 
this  age  and  in  the  face  of  an  enemy  al- 
ready in  arms,  the  flag  that  bears  the  lilies 
of  the  Lord.  And  it  is  not  because  this 
is  the  ground  of  greatest  advantage  to  the 
Church  that  I  long  for  the  first  shot  to  be 
fired  and  the  first  charge  to  be  made  in  the 
name  of  Purity,  but  because  Impurity  is 
the   head   of   Antichrist.    Impurity   is   a 


76  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

menace  to  civilization  and  to  religion  in- 
finitely bolder  and  infinitely  more  destruc- 
tive than  infidelity;  it  is  the  most  conta- 
gious disease  of  the  soul;  it  is  the  spirit 
of  the  age ;  and  it  is  already  so  insolent  in 
power  and  so  boastful  in  its  logic  that 
unless  it  be  immediately  attacked  it  will 
defy  destruction. 

What  must  be  the  first  action  of  the 
Church? 

As  we  have  already  affirmed,  the  great 
and  sovran  means  to  this  end  is  the  exalta- 
tion of  Woman.  To  exalt  Woman,  as  we 
have  said,  man's  attitude  towards  women 
must  be  changed,  and  to  change  this  atti- 
tude man  must  be  taught  to  entertain  the 
idea  that  Purity  is  a  natural  condition  of 
the  soul,  Impurity  the  corruption  and  per- 
versity of  a  natural  instinct. 

But  this  is  animal  Purity. 

I  do  not  think  that  a  man  who  truly 
knows  the  world  will  assert  that  any  ani- 
mal virtue  is  safe  without  the  consecration 
of  religion ;  and  certainly  no  animal  virtue 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     77 

is  less  safe  without  the  consecration  of  re- 
ligion than  Purity.  If  Purity  is  left  to  the 
ethicists,  democracy  will  fashion  itself  a 
new  ethics  puzzling  to  the  older  moralists. 
Nor  do  I  mean  by  democracy  the  ignorant 
and  brutal  masses  of  mankind;  I  mean  the 
godless  and  half-educated  multitudes  who 
shout  for  individual  liberty  in  the  moral 
sphere  on  intellectual  grounds  discoverable 
in  the  works  of  such  teachers  as  Mr.  Ber- 
nard Shaw.  These  people  will  soon  prove 
that  the  higher  animals  are  only  pure  for 
want  of  self-consciousness,  that  the  evolu- 
tion of  the  human  race  is  towards  variety 
and  choice,  that  there  is  no  more  reason 
why  a  man  in  the  twentieth  century  should 
be  as  pure  as  the  Golden  Eagle  than  that 
he  should  abandon  his  tooth-brush  and 
trousers  because  such  inventions  of  hu- 
man ingenuity  are  not  to  be  found  among 
the  anthropoid  apes.  Already  such  an 
animal  virtue  as  valor  is  condemned  by 
certain  ethicists  as  irrational ;  martyrs  are 
exhibited  by  the  cynics  of  the  age  as  so 


78  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

many  fools  who  threw  away  their  lives  for 
a  quibble.  Therefore,  Purity,  wliich  calls 
for  all  the  strength  of  the  soul,  is  not  safe 
without  the  consecration  of  religion. 
Moreover,  since  Christ  insisted  upon  this 
virtue  with  the  most  daring,  the  most 
piercing,  the  most  profound,  and  the  most 
illuminating  of  all  His  aphorisms, — Every 
one  that  looketh  on  a  woman  to  lust  after 
her  hath  committed  adultery  with  her  al- 
ready in  his  heart, — we  may  be  very  sure 
that  Purity  is  of  central  and  infinite  im- 
portance to  humanity. 

Animal  purity,  or  natural  purity,  is  re- 
spect for  woman  as  mother  of  mankind;  it 
is  simply  racial  instinct;  it  is  exposed  to 
manifold  perversions.  But  in  Christ,  Who 
is  the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  the  inspira- 
tion of  a  new  hope,  the  communication  of 
a  new  strength,  this  animal  or  natural 
purity  becomes  a  supernatural,  a  spiritual, 
a  divine  purity.  The  moralist  teaches  us 
that  adultery  is  wrong,  and  bids  us  fight 
against  temptation.    Christ  unhesitatingly 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     79 

declares  that  the  man  who  has  lust  in  his 
heart  is  even  as  the  man  who  has  fallen 
victim  to  his  lust.  The  purity  of  Christ  is 
not  a  purity  of  conduct,  it  is  a  purity  of 
inwardness.  It  is  not  the  outside  of  the 
body  that  must  be  cleansed ;  it  is  the  centre 
of  the  life.  And  revealing  to  humanity 
this  non-human  necessity  of  the  new  life, 
He  inspires  us  with  a  new  hope,  communi- 
cates to  us  a  new  strength  sufficient  even 
for  this  attainment. 

The  new  hope  is  immortality,  and  knowl- 
edge of  immortality  upon  earth.  ''  Blessed 
are  the  pure  in  heart,  for  they  shall  see 
God.''  The  new  strength  is  Christ  Him- 
self, Who  comes  to  the  heart  of  man  and 
can  only  then  enter,  when  man,  conscious 
of  his  insufficient  strength,  calls  to  Him. 
''  Behold,  I  stand  at  the  door  and  knock,'' 
Tagore  has  seized  the  beauty  of  this 
pausing  Christ  standing  at  the  door  of  the 
human  heart  waiting  to  be  called  within. 
God  does  not  come  to  us  as  King,  tyrannous 
and  conquering.    He  comes  as  Guest.    He 


80  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

does  not  take  possession  of  us  and  make  us 
His  slaves;  He  waits  to  be  invited  to  our 
hearts.  God  is  not  seeking  a  servant  in 
humanity,  but  a  host.  The  mystery  of  the 
Incarnation  is  the  guesthood  of  God.* 

It  is,  then,  of  utter  importance  that  re- 
ligion should  make  war  upon  Impurity, 
since  it  is  only  through  Christ  that  the 
heart  of  humanity  can  be  cleansed  and 
that  natural  purity  can  be  strengthened 
with  spiritual  power.  We  might  hope  to 
overcome  impurity  in  its  baser  forms  by 
science,  education,  and  laws;  but  without 
Christ  we  cannot  transform  the  pure  and 
natural  race  instinct  into  a  passion  of  the 
spirit.    Without   Christ,   our  purity   can 

*  "  When  Augustine  prayed, '  Give  me  chastity,  but  not 
yet,'  he  really  wanted  to  be  pure,  and  he  also  really 
wanted  to  indulge  a  little  longer;  and  it  was  the  same 
he  who  wanted  both.  To  say  to  such  a  man  that  he  must 
strengthen  his  will  is  mockery;  his  will  is  just  himself, 
and  how  shall  a  man  strengthen  himself  except  by  coming 
deliberately,  when  the  good  desire  is  uppermost,  under 
some  external  influence?  And  how  shall  that  good 
desire  ever  be  uppermost,  except  through  the  indwelling 
Spirit  or  communicated  grace  of  God?" — William 
Temple  in  Foundations,  Chap.  V,  pp.  23G-7. 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     81 

only  resemble  the  decorous  and  orderly 
respectability  of  a  model  village  or  a  gar- 
den city;  it  can  never  redeem  us  from  all 
iniquity,  it  can  never  transfuse  us  with  the 
poetry  of  immortality.  Without  Christ 
even  a  virtuous  family  life  may  be  dull 
and  provincial,  without  the  true  Christ  it 
may  be  narrow,  harsh,  and  unattractive. 
Christ  is  the  supreme  Necessity  of  the 
human  race. 

And  when  the  militant  Church  comes  to 
perceive  this,  and  to  perceive  it  and  appre- 
hend it  so  that  she  cannot  help  but  act 
upon  the  conviction,  she  will  find  that  the 
insistence  of  Christ  on  the  purity  of  in- 
wardness is  as  greatly  a  teaching  of  social 
reform  as  of  the  religious  life.  She  will 
come  to  see  that  our  efforts  at  political 
reformation  have  failed  because  we  have 
not  first  laid  their  foundations  in  the  heart 
of  man.  She  will  come  to  know  that  sci- 
ence, education,  culture,  ethics,  and  legis- 
lation have  failed  to  bring  Millennium  and 
failed  to  discover  Utopia,  because  the  only 


82  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

thousand  years  of  joy  is  the  eternal  Now 
of  consciousness,  the  only  Utopia  is  the 
heart  of  man.  But  when  she  has  made  the 
discovery,  when  she  realizes  that  the  heart 
of  man  must  be  cleansed,  that  women  must 
be  exalted,  and  that  purity  must  be  made 
the  foundation  of  character,  how  shall  she 
proceed  in  her  crusade  against  the  enemy 
of  truth  and  beauty  and  joy? 

It  is  easy  enough  to  say  that  the  Church 
must  take  arms  against  Impurity,  to  lose 
oneself  in  a  military  metaphor  until  every 
trumpet  is  sounding,  every  drum  beating, 
every  standard  shining  in  the  sun,  and  only 
arms  and  plan  of  campaign  are  wanting; 
but  what  in  very  truth  must  the  Church  do, 
what  course  of  action  must  she  pursue, 
what  is  the  definite  and  different  and  new 
action  she  must  take  in  this  crisis  of 
morals? 

If  I  say  at  the  beginning  that  she  must 
first  believe  in  Christ,  shall  I  be  rebuked 
for  insolence  or  mocked  for  an  escape  into 
indefinite  elusiveness? 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     83 

But  I  do  not  mean  by  this  saying  that 
the  Church  must  believe  in  dogmas  con- 
cerning Christ  or  that  she  must  increase 
her  energy  in  theological  speculation.  I 
mean  that  at  the  beginning  of  her  action 
she  must  verily  believe  in  the  continuing 
presence  with  humanity  of  a  Guest  Christ, 
a  Guest  Christ  waiting  to  help  and  only 
able  to  help  when  our  wills  consent  and 
our  hearts  open  to  receive  Him;  and  I 
mean  that  she  must  also  verily  believe  in 
the  necessity  of  this  Christ,  so  believe  in 
His  necessity  to  humanity  that  she  is  not 
merely  sceptical  of  political  reform  or 
doubtful  as  to  this  and  that  expedient  of 
social  reformers,  but  that  she  judges 
every  effort  of  reform  by  the  revelation 
of  Christ  and  flings  the  whole  weight  of 
her  power  to  spiritualize  with  His  spirit 
every  one  of  these  reforms  which  is  not 
contrary  to  His  revelation. 

Has  the  Church  yet  manifested  such  a 
faith  in  Christ? 

Ask  yourself  what  part  the  Church  has 


84  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

played  in  the  many  courageous  and  com- 
passionate movements  towards  Brother- 
hood? 

Ask  yourself  what  part  the  Church  is 
playing  now  to  cleanse  our  national  life 
of  the  intolerable  shame  of  sweating? 
Ask  yourself  what  part  the  Church  is  play- 
ing now  to  sweep  out  of  existence  those 
rookeries  and  slums  which  science  and  ex- 
perience teach  us  are  responsible  for  so 
much  disease,  so  much  misery,  and  so 
much  awful  iniquity — even  that  growing 
and  most  awful  of  all  infernal  iniquities, 
the  iniquity  of  incest?  * 

I  do  not  say  that  these  reforms  are  easy 
to  effect,  or  that  they  can  be  done  swiftly 
and    violently;    but    I    ask    whether    the 

*  In  a  Dublin  police-court  the  other  day  a  man  was 
asked  to  state  the  number  of  people  who  lived  in  the 
single  room  which  constituted  his  home.  He  replied, 
"  My  wife,  myself,  six  children  of  mine,  my  brother 
Pat,  and  one  child  of  his  who  is  dying  of  consumption. 
There  are  ten  of  us  in  the  room."  The  man's  wife  said 
that  the  ages  of  her  children  ranged  from  thirteen  years 
to  twelve  months.  "  One  of  them  was  sick  now,  and 
Pat's  child  might  die  at  any  moment,  as  its  lungs  were 
bleeding." — See  Public  Opinion,  October  10,  1913. 


A  CHALLENGE  TO  THE  CHURCH     85 

Clmrcli  as  a  Church  is  doing  any  single 
thing  to  bring  them  about! 

Is  it  not  true  that  the  Church  never  or- 
ganizes herself  for  political  action  except 
when  her  own  temporal  advantages  are  in 
jeopardy?  And  does  this  not  point  to  the 
implication  that  the  Church  neither  be- 
lieves in  Christ  nor  considers  Him  essen- 
tial to  human  welfare! — does  it  not  vindi- 
cate the  conviction  of  democracy  that  the 
Church  is  only  the  policeman  of  her  own 
property  and  the  pedagogue  of  her  own 
conventions  1 

Faith  in  the  continuing  presence  of 
Christ,  faith  in  the  necessity  of  Christ, — 
this  vital,  living,  and  convincing  faith 
would  make  the  Church  a  spirit  of  sovran 
power,  would  quicken  religion  into  the 
chief,  the  only  ferment  of  our  national 
existence. 

All  the  Churches  of  Protestantism  are 
guilty  in  this  respect,  and  no  one  Church 
can  cast  stones  at  another.  To  democracy 
the    Church    of    Christ,    not    merely    the 


86  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

Churches  of  Christendom,  is  under  sus- 
picion, and  it  is  under  suspicion  because 
it  is  so  inexplicably,  so  indefensibly  sepa- 
rated from  the  labor  of  the  social  con- 
science. 

Were  it  not  wise  for  the  Church,  before 
she  takes  arms  against  Impurity,  to  con- 
sider the  futility  of  theological  disputation, 
the  unprofitableness  of  ecclesiastical  con- 
troversies, and  to  fulfil  herself  with  the  one 
perfect,  sufficient,  and  eternal  Affirmation 
of  Christianity  which  is  Christ  Himself? 

*  *  Of  all  the  attacks  of  so  many  thinkers 
upon  each  other,''  said  M.  Bergson  in  his 
presidential  address  to  the  Society  for 
Psychical  Eesearch,  ^^  what  remains? — 
nothing,  or  very  little.  What  counts  and 
endures  is  the  positive  truth  we  have  de- 
clared: the  real  affirmation  substitutes 
itself  for  the  false  idea,  and  is  found  to  be, 
though  one  has  not  taken  the  trouble  to 
contradict  anybody,  the  best  of  contradic- 
tions.'' 


vn 

A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN 

WITH  this  positive  faith  in  Christ, 
the  immediate  course  of  the 
Church  is  straight  and  de- 
cisive. She  must  attack  Impurity  and 
organize  her  forces  to  attack  it. 

How  should  she  attack  it? 

She  must  attack  it  publicly,  politically, 
nationally.  She  must  attack  it  as  it  was 
attacked  locally  many  years  ago  in  the 
town  of  Chatham,  England,  a  great  naval 
and  military  depot,  yet  not  in  the  spirit 
of  a  mission  or  a  revival,  not  spasmod- 
ically, and  not  as  an  angry  aside  of  her 
dignified  life.  It  must  be  a  calm,  lasting, 
and  most  earnest  concentration  of  her 
energies,  with  nothing  suppressed  or 
morbid  in  the  methods  employed, — with 

87 


88  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

politics  and  science  on  either  side  of  her 
advancing  host,  but  with  Christ's  revela- 
tion of  a  new  life,  Christ's  inspiration  of 
a  new  hope,  Christ's  communication  of  a 
new  strength  as  her  flaming  and  uncon- 
querable centre.  With  the  recognition  that 
Impurity  is  the  chief  disease  of  the  age, 
the  Church,  as  the  physician  of  hu- 
manity, must  organize  all  her  forces  not 
for  its  suppression,  but  for  its  extirpa- 
tion. 

This  town  may  serve  as  our  microcosm. 
It  was  probably  no  worse  than,  if  as  bad 
as,  many  another  town  of  the  same  size. 
But  a  man  went  there  who  perceived  that 
its  immorality  was  shocking  and  horrible, 
a  man  who  could  not  bear  to  see  this 
shameless  immorality  without  taking  ac- 
tion; and  because  of  this  man,  who  be- 
lieved in  the  power  of  Christ,  and  who 
was  determined  to  strike  for  religion 
against  such  public  corruption,  this  to^vn 
was  cleansed.  What  this  one  man  did  for 
a  single  town  the  Church  can  do,  and  can 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  89 

do  lastingly,  for  the  whole  country,  and  the 
whole  world. 

The  man  who  thus  attacked  Impurity  in 
Chatham  was  a  minister  of  the  Gospel.  He 
did  not  content  himself  with  denouncing 
vice  in  the  pulpit,  but  went  out  into  the 
streets  and  led  a  public  crusade  against  it. 
He  persuaded  a  local  newspaper  to  let  him 
expose  the  horrors  of  the  town  and  brought 
into  existence  a  public  opinion.  In  spite 
of  the  choleric  denials  which  always  greet 
such  an  exposure,  in  spite  of  the  indigna- 
tion worked  up  against  him  as  a  vilifier  of 
the  town's  good  name,  he  continued  this 
fearless,  pitiless,  and  deadly  indictment. 
Then,  when  public  opinion  was  sharply 
aroused,  he  went  to  the  Salvation  Army, 
made  arrangements  with  it  for  the  recep- 
tion of  every  fallen  woman  willing  to  be 
redeemed,  and  afterwards  sent  his  emis- 
saries into  the  streets.  These  emissaries 
explained  to  the  fallen  women  that  if  they 
wished  to  recover  their  decency  and  self- 
respect,  a  door  stood  open  before  them,  a 


90  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

hand  was  already  stretched  out  to  receive 
them;  and  they  were  warned  at  the  same 
time  that  if  they  remained  one  day  longer 
on  the  streets  of  the  town  they  would  be 
arrested.  In  one  single  day  two  hundred 
of  these  women  were  prosecuted  and  sent 
to  prison.  Such  was  the  state  of  public 
indignation  that  the  naval  and  military 
authorities  were  forced  to  take  action. 
Numbers  of  bad  houses  were  placed  '^  out 
of  bounds.'^  The  whole  town  changed  its 
attitude  towards  vice.  A  new  spirit  was 
born  into  the  life  of  the  community. 

Thus,  by  the  energy  and  courage  of  one 
man  this  town,  if  only  for  a  time,  was 
cleansed  of  much  iniquity. 

Now  consider  what  would  be  the  effect 
if  the  Church  undertook  with  the  same 
earnestness  and  the  same  fearlessness  a 
crusade  against  the  manifold  impurities  of 
the  age.  Suppose  that  the  newspapers 
were  persuaded  to  assist  in  the  national 
cleansing,  and  that  the  nation  was  apprised 
day  after  day  of  all  those  things  which 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  91 

pollute  the  air  and  poison  the  blood, — told 
of  the  incredible  spread  of  contagious  dis- 
ease, told  of  the  number  of  fallen  women, — 
an  immense  army — told  of  the  machina- 
tions of  procurer  and  pimp,  told,  too,  of 
the  economical  conditions  which  lead  to 
the  ruin  of  so  much  virtue.  And  suppose 
that  those  members  of  our  National  Gov- 
ernment who  are  Christians  forced  this 
question  of  national  Impurity  before  the 
attention  of  the  House,  joining  their  forces 
to  compel  legislative  action.  And  suppose 
that  every  parish  in  the  land  was  organ- 
ized to  fight  this  campaign  in  its  own  terri- 
tory, fighting  it  in  the  streets  as  well  as 
in  Church  and  public  hall.  And  suppose 
that  all  the  fallen  women  in  the  land  were 
given  the  same  choice  given  to  the  fallen 
women  of  the  town  referred  to — the  choice 
between  rescue  and  prosecution.  Is  it  not 
certain  that  in  such  a  campaign  as  this. 
Purity  would  emerge  triumphant  and 
Christianity  come  at  last  to  its  own  as  the 
sovran  influence  of  national  life? 


9^  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

But  the  Cliurcli  would  have  to  do  even 
more  than  this  to  set  Purity  on  the  throne 
of  power.    All  this  is  comparatively  easy 
of  accomplishment,  is,  indeed,  a  reform  so 
long  overdue  that  men  have  come  to  regard 
the  scandal  of  our  streets  as  a  necessary 
evil.    It  only  needs  a  stirring  up  of  pub- 
lic opinion  to  make  men  realize,  for  in- 
stance, that  there  is  no  more  reason  in  the 
world  why  thousands  of  bad  women  should 
take  possession  of  the  central  streets  of 
the  metropolis  at  night  than  that  one  bad 
woman  should  be  allowed  to  walk  the  street 
of  a  respectable  village.    I  happen  to  know 
that  the  police  of  our  metropolis  resent 
very  bitterly  the  indignity  and  disgust  of 
controlling  the  nightly   carnival  of  vice, 
and  that  they  only  want  one  word  from  a 
courageous  authority  to  clear  the  streets 
absolutely  of  this  frightful  effrontery. 

But  this,  as  I  think,  is  a  first  step  easy 
and  inevitable.  I  cannot  think  that  a 
Church  really  in  earnest  would  encounter 
serious  difficulty  in  such  obvious  and  de- 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  93 

cent  reform.  One  thinks,  indeed,  that  a 
single  newspaper  might  settle  the  public 
scandal  of  harlotry  in  a  campaign  of  six 
months.  But  Purity  will  never  be  estab- 
lished on  the  ruins  of  vice. 

How  shall  we  labor  to  build  up  Purity 
on  religious  foundations,  how  strive  to 
make  Purity  a  virtue  of  our  national  char- 
acter? 

Now,  every  man  who  has  studied  this 
question  knows  very  well  that  the  expla- 
nations usually  offered  for  dreadful  vice 
are  insufficient.  To  take  but  one  instance; 
it  is  commonly  stated  that  immorality  in  a 
certain  school  is  due  to  overfeeding,  over- 
feeding particularly  in  the  matter  of  ani- 
mal food.  And  vice  in  general  is  attributed 
more  to  this  single  cause  than  to  anything 
else.  We  over-eat,  we  over-stimulate  our 
bodies,  and  the  animal  grows  stronger  than 
the  soul.  But  this  plausible  explanation  is 
as  little  true  in  fact  as  the  more  absurd 
delusion  that  an  aesthetic  temperament  is 
the  cause  of  sexual  madness.     One  dis- 


94  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

covers  that  vice  exists  in  orphanages  where 
boys  are  fed  with  a  scrupulous  attention  to 
health,  and  where  meat  is  certainly  cut 
down  to  a  most  attenuated  minimum.  One 
finds,  too,  that  uncouth  and  barbarous 
operatives  in  a  small  manufacturiag  town 
can  be  as  vicious  as  the  most  refined  and 
elegant  sybarites  of  our  larger  cities. 
One  finds,  too,  that  men  employed  in  so 
laborious  and  healthy  an  occupation  as  sea- 
faring are  as  liable  to  perversions  as  the 
sensuous  flaneurs  and  the  posing  philan- 
derers of  the  most  artificial  circles  in  so- 
ciety. No,  there  is  little  hope  for  humanity 
if  we  seek  our  remedies  in  diet  and  exer- 
cise. There  is  no  hope  at  all  of  a  cure  if 
we  limit  our  diagnosis  to  the  body. 

There  is  but  one  universal  cause  of  vice, 
and  it  lies  in  the  will  of  man — it  is  the  will 
itself.  Not  all  the  physical  culture,  not  all 
the  dieting  in  the  world,  can  change  the 
will  of  a  man ;  nor  do  I  think  that  any  man 
can  himself  radically  change  his  will.  It 
is    only    the    communication    of    a    new 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  95 

strength  that  can  enable  men  to  follow  the 
revelation  of  a  new  life  in  the  inspiration 
of  a  new  hope.  A  new  strength,  a 
strength  from  outside  of  us,  a  supernatu- 
ral strength,  the  mystical  communicated 
strength  that  flows  into  the  soul  of  man 
from  a  union  of  his  will  with  God's— this  it 
is  alone  which  can  cleanse  the  heart  and 
fortify  the  soul  in  virtue. 

It  depresses  one  almost  to  a  state  of 
hopelessness  to  fkid  men  and  women  who 
are  fighting  Impurity  in  the  name  of  re- 
ligion obsessed  by  the  political  spirit.  Re- 
hgion  brings  these  organizations  into  ex- 
istence, but  religion  loses  them  almost  as 
soon  as  they  are  organized.  They  become 
political.  They  contract  the  bad  habit  of 
lobbying.  They  deliberate  with  politicians 
and  doctors.  They  publish  medical  pam- 
phlets. They  issue  interesting  reports  on 
housing  and  the  birth-rate.  They  become 
as  orthodox  as  the  Bible  Society,  as  im- 
posing and  as  little  apostolic  as  a  Church 
Congress. 


96  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

How  can  men  and  women  of  intelligence 
persuade  themselves  that  reform  in  hous- 
ing is  a  cure  for  vice  when  the  most  vicious 
people  of  the  community  are  housed  in 
decency  and  comfort?  How  can  they  lay 
such  tremendous  emphasis  on  education 
when  obvious  as  the  sun  at  mid-day  is  the 
depravity  of  the  educated  classes?  How 
can  they  work  themselves  into  a  scientific 
enthusiasm  on  the  subject  of  diet,  when 
vice  of  every  kind  is  found  amongst  the 
poorest  classes? 

I  suppose  there  are  no  people  so  chaste 
as  the  peasants  of  Ireland,  and  they  are 
still  housed  in  many  districts  worse  than 
animals.  I  doubt  if  any  class  in  the  com- 
munity is  more  gross  in  immorality  than 
seamen,  whose  bodies  are  strong  and 
whose  diet  is  measured  to  the  limit  of 
necessity.  And  where  can  one  find  greater 
insolence  towards  purity  than  among  those 
sections  of  society  who  boast  of  their  re- 
finement and  who  are  certainly  better  edu- 
cated than  the  middle  and  lower  classes? 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  97 

All  these  false  ideas  about  environment, 
physical  conditions,  and  mental  culture  are 
as  foolish  as  the  solemn  nonsense  talked  by 
Eichard  Burton  about  a  ''  Sotadic  Zone.'' 
Vice  in  every  phase  is  found  in  every  quar- 
ter of  the  world  and  among  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men.  Virtue  knows  nothing 
of  geography,  is  indifferent  to  climate,  and 
triumphs  over  heredity  and  environment. 
No  man  who  has  travelled  with  observa- 
tion, and  who  has  read  with  intelligence, 
can  doubt  that  vice  and  virtue  are  to  be 
found  everywhere  under  the  sun. 

I  would  not  have  the  reader  think  me  so 
foolish  as  to  see  no  importance  in  housing, 
education,  and  diet.  In  my  anxiety  to  tear 
men  away  from  the  delusion  that  these 
things  are  matters  of  the  first  urgency,  I 
fear  that  I  expose  myself  to  the  censure  of 
a  hasty  and  careless  critic.  And  therefore, 
I  would  interpolate  at  this  place  an  em- 
phatic statement  that  I  desire  with  all  my 
heart,  on  moral  as  well  as  upon  physical 
grounds,  to  see  mankind  better  housed,  bet- 


98  THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

ter  educated,  and  wiser  in  their  dieting. 
Not  only  is  man's  physical  health  im- 
proved by  sanitary  dwellings,  an  employed 
brain,  and  natural  food,  but  his  will  can 
exert  its  force  easier  and  get  a  greater 
reaction  from  a  body  brought  into  a  con- 
dition of  physical  fitness  by  these  means. 
The  body  of  a  man  is  like  an  engine,  the 
will  is  the  driver  of  that  engine,  and  an 
engine  to  be  efficient  must  be  treated  with 
every  care  and  every  caution. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  obvious,  surely  it  is 
staringly  obvious,  that  the  first  of  all  con- 
siderations is  the  will.  A  skilled  driver 
would  get  more  out  of  a  fifth-rate  engine 
than  a  man  ignorant  of  engineering  would 
get  out  of  the  finest  engine  in  the  world. 
Mischa  Elmann,  given  a  child's  fiddle, 
could  make  better  music  than  a  ploughman 
could  get  from  the  most  perfect  of  violins. 
The  power  of  man  resides  in  his  will,  and 
to  over-emphasize  the  importance  of  his 
physical  apparatus  is  to  make  religion  the 
handmaid  of  politics. 


A  PLAN  OF  CAMPAIGN  99 

It  should  surely  be  the  first,  if  not  the 
only  employment  of  religion,  to  insist  upon 
this  immense  premiership  of  man's  will. 
Science  can  be  trusted,  and  politics  can 
now  be  trusted,  to  work  for  social  ameliora- 
tion ;  it  is  not  as  if  politics  and  science  were 
without  the  humanitarian  impulse  of  a 
democratic  spirit,  not  as  if  religion  had  to 
do  with  political  parties  or  with  the  as- 
trologer and  the  alchemist;  science  and 
politics  are  definitely  inspired  with  the 
spirit  of  social  progress ;  they  may  be  en- 
couraged and  hastened  by  the  religious 
conscience,  but  they  do  not  need  to  be  con- 
verted; indeed  one  might  say  that  both 
science  and  politics  are  working  more 
faithfully  for  brotherhood  than  organized 
religion. 

But  religion  is  not  insisting  as  it  ought 
to  insist  upon  the  will  of  man  as  the  very 
centre  of  human  life.  To  insist  upon  this 
truth  of  history  and  experience,  is  to  save 
the  only  form  of  individualism  which  can 
survive    the    experiments    of    democracy. 


100        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

The  bodies  of  men  can  be  regimented  for 
the  State,  and  the  possessions  of  men  can 
be  treasuried  for  the  commonwealth,  but 
the  souls  of  men  cannot  be  massed,  cannot 
be  driven,  cannot  be  changed  by  legislation 
or  altered  by  a  shibboleth  of  political  faith. 
They  are  separate.  They  are  free.  They 
are  invisible  and  unarrestable.  And  it  is 
in  their  souls,  not  in  their  bodies,  that  men 
are  either  happy  or  sad,  righteous  or  evil. 
Not  all  the  poverty  and  deprivations  of  the 
social  abyss  could  darken  the  soul  of  St. 
Francis,  nor  all  the  beauty  and  luxury,  all 
the  splendor  and  dignities  of  sovereignty 
purify  the  evil  heart  of  Pope  Sixtus  IV. 

The  will  of  man  is  the  sphere  of  religion, 
and  in  this  stern  encounter  with  impurity 
it  is  to  the  wills  of  men  that  religion  must 
address  her  warning  and  her  invitation. 


yiii 

THE  CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW 

IDEA 

EVERY  one  either  knows  or  believes  in 
I  *^  the  expulsive  power  of  a  new  af- 
fection."    There  is  another  power 
of  equal  force  not  yet  so  generally  recog- 
nized, and  this  is  the  creative  force  of  a 
new  idea. 

We  learn  from  medical  science  and  from 
psychical  inqiry  that  suggestion  plays  an 
enormous  part  in  the  human  mind.  The 
most  powerful  form  of  suggestion— made 
by  a  medical  man  during  a  state  of  hyp- 
nosis in  the  patient— will  cure  the  very 
worst  disease  of  the  soul,  even  the  most 
rooted  of  moral  perversions. 

But  there  are  other  forms  of  suggestion 
which  operate  with  considerable  power  in 

101 


102         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

a  perfectly  natural  manner  and  upon  mul- 
titudes of  men  at  the  same  time.  There  is 
distinct  suggestion,  for  instance,  of  music 
hall,  of  tavern,  of  street,  of  mountain,  of 
valley,  and  of  sea.  It  is  not  so  easy  for 
the  best  of  men  to  feel  conscious  of  religion 
in  certain  places,  nor  so  easy  in  other 
places  for  a  sensualist  to  believe  in  his 
sensualism.  An  actor  might  conceivably 
play  Hamlet  in  a  cathedral,  but  it  would  be 
difficult  for  a  clown  to  sing  a  comic  song  in 
the  National  Gallery  or  the  Congressional 
Library. 

I  believe  that  the  immorality  of  the  age 
proceeds  very  largely  from  suggestion,  and 
that  the  horrible  forms  of  impurity  which 
threaten  social  life  may  be  traced  to  the 
creative  power  of  a  new  idea.  This  new 
idea  is  only  new  in  the  sense  that  it  is  a 
recurrence  to  the  human  mind  of  an  idea 
hitherto  suppressed  and  certainly  held  to 
be  shameful  by  the  majority,  an  idea  which 
has  sprung  into  new  life  ever  since  the 
propagation  fifty  years  ago  of  the  Darwin- 


CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW  IDEA    103 

ian  thesis.  This  idea  consists  in  the  con- 
viction that  men  and  women  are  animals, 
that  animal  passions  are  not  only  natural 
and  necessary,  but  superior  to  moral  laws, 
that  God  is  at  most  an  indefinite  hypothe- 
sis, that  immortality  is  the  absurd  super- 
stition of  barbarous  ages,  that  life  is  with- 
out purpose  and  without  aim. 

Such  an  idea  is  a  revolution. 

Do  we  quite  realize  that  this  idea  is 
spreading  with  extraordinary  rapidity 
among  the  multitudes, — spreading  with 
the  greater  rapidity  because  by  them  it  is 
never  formulated!  We  who  read  and  we 
who  think  know  that  the  Darwinian  thesis 
is  challengeable,  and  that  properly  formu- 
lated as  Darwin  himself  formulated  it, 
there  is  nothing  in  this  thesis  which  does 
not  add  to  the  glory  and  dignity  of  the 
universe.  But  humanity  is  not  composed 
of  those  who  read  and  think,  and  even 
among  those  who  do  read  and  think  there 
are  those  who  believe  the  Darwinian  idea 
to  be  the  death  of  Christianity— no  Fall  of 


104?         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

Man,  and  therefore  no  Atonement.  These 
men  and  women,  if  they  are  writers  and 
speakers,  take  delight  in  spreading  their 
convictions  among  the  multitudes;  a  so- 
ciety exists  for  the  propaganda  of  ''  ra- 
tionalism'^;  democracy,  where  it  takes 
a  serious  interest  in  life,  is  learning  in 
cheap  pamphlets,  in  sensational  magazines 
and  books,  and  in  public  meetings  to  be- 
lieve that  religion  is  false,  that  God  is  un- 
knowable, that  man  is  an  animal.  And  this 
idea,  definite  and  formulated  for  a  few 
thousands  of  people,  is  spreading  like  a 
contagion  among  millions  who  neither  rea- 
son nor  desire  reason,  whose  unoccupied 
minds  are  only  receptive  to  catch  uncon- 
sciously the  common  notions  of  the  mass, 
without  apprehension  it  is  true,  but  with  a 
vague  sub-conscious  consequence. 

No  passage  in  the  brilliant  address  of 
M.  Bergson  already  quoted  was  more  sig- 
nificant than  that  in  which  he  spoke  about 
the  phenomena  of  telepathy. 

*  ^  If  telepathy  is  a  real^  fact,  it  is  a  fact 


CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW  IDEA    105 

which  can  be  indefinitely  repeated.  I  go 
further:  if  telepathy  is  a  real  fact,  it  is 
quite  possible  that  it  is  always  at  work  and 
in  every  one,  but  with  such  slight  intensity 
that  it  is  unnoticed,  or  in  the  presence  of 
obstacles  which  neutralize  the  effect  at  the 
very  moment  when  it  is  about  to  manifest 
itself." 

One  believes  that  there  is  no  obstacle  to 
neutralize  this  effect  when  the  brain  is 
spongy,  torpid,  and  dense  with  unemploy- 
ment, and  that  however  slight  the  inten- 
sity of  the  common  thought  may  be  it  does 
produce  an  effect,  it  does  exert  a  positive 
influence  on  the  minds  of  the  multitude. 
Thus  it  is  that  the  work  of  a  few  thinkers 
in  any  given  period  spreads  so  marvel- 
lously that  historians  can  speak  of  *^  the 
spirit  of  the  age.'*  Thus  it  is  that  we  find 
the  most  ignorant  and  stupid  millions  of 
mankind  acting  in  the  spirit  of  ideas  which 
they  have  never  consciously  apprehended 
and  never  even  indefinitely  formulated  to 
themselves,  acting,  living  their  lives,  in  the 


106        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

spirit  of  ideas  formulated  by  the  tens,  ap- 
prehended by  the  hundreds,  and  perceived 
even  only  by  the  thousands. 

This  telepathy,  this  form  of  suggestion, 
is  infinitely  more  powerful  on  the  lower 
planes  of  intellect.  A  sudden  loosening  of 
moral  restraints  among  a  few  people,  a 
sudden  fashion  of  light  conduct,  a  sudden 
spirit  of  frivolity  or  animalism,  spreads 
with  a  most  extraordinary  intensity 
throughout  the  whole  social  organism.  A 
man  like  William  Poel  encounters  almost 
insurmountable  obstacles  in  suggesting 
that  the  theatre  is  not  a  booth  or  a  shop, 
rather  a  temple  of  art  consecrated  to  truth, 
taste,  and  beauty;  but  the  person  who  in- 
troduces a  new  form  of  sensual  dancing 
finds  his  suggestions  acted  upon  with 
surprising  enthusiasm  from  Moscow  to 
Venice,  and  from  Venice  to  London,  and 
from  London  to  San  Francisco  almost  be- 
fore he  has  established  a  reputation  as  in- 
novator. 

We  must  perceive,  then,  that  a  powerful 


CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW  IDEA    107 

force  of  telepathy  is  always  in  operation, 
proceeding  from  the  vigorous  minds  of  the 
commonplace  materialists,  who  are  deter- 
mined to  regard  life  only  as  an  adventure 
in  animalism.  This  telepathy  exists  in 
every  street  and  house,  in  every  shop- 
window,  in  every  book  and  magazine,  in 
every  word,  even  in  every  face.  Men  and 
women  by  their  inmost  thoughts  and  by  the 
manner  of  their  lives  exert  an  influence, 
create  an  atmosphere,  set  in  motion  an 
engine  which  drives  the  world. 

Consider  this  wonderful  passage,  so  un- 
true to  coarse  minds,  so  certainly  true  to 
every  one  conscious  of  spiritual  influence 
— this  wonderful  and  beautiful  passage  in 
Dostoievsky's  great  novel  The  Brothers 
Karamazov: 

"•  Every  day  and  every  hour,  every 
minute,  walk  round  yourself,  and  see 
that  your  image  is  a  seemly  one.  You 
pass  by  a  little  child,  you  pass  by,  spite- 
ful with  ugly  words,  with  wrathful  heart ; 


108         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

you  may  not  have  noticed  the  child  but 
he  has  seen  you,  and  your  image,  un- 
seemly and  ignoble,  may  remain  in  his 
defenceless  heart.  You  don't  know  it, 
but  you  may  have  sown  an  evil  seed  in 
him  and  it  may  grow,  and  all  because 
you  were  not  careful  before  the  child, 
because  you  did  not  foster  in  yourself  a 
careful,  acting,  benevolent  love.'' 

If  the  face  of  an  angry  and  hating  man 
may  throw  a  dark  shadow  on  the  defence- 
less heart  of  a  child,  what  influence  is  cast 
upon  the  equally  defenceless  heart  of  youth 
by  the  universal  sensualism  of  a  gross  and 
sinful  age  manifesting  itself  in  the  im- 
modesty of  pictures,  the  indecencies  of 
feminine  garments,  the  lubricities  of  thea- 
tre and  music-hall,  the  wanton,  insolent, 
and  unashamed  luxury  of  shop-windows, 
the  flippancies  of  conversation,  and  the  un- 
challenged possession  of  public  streets  by 
vice  in  its  most  shocking  and  incredible 
degradations  ? 


CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW  IDEA    109 

From  such  telepathy  as  this,  exerted  by 
millions  of  minds  all  over  the  world,  pro- 
ceeds the  horrible  illusion  that  Impurity  is 
natural,  that  purity  is  the  impossible  ideal 
of  religious  fanatics.    From  this  tremen- 
dously   potent    telepathy    has    come    the 
hideous    cynicism,    the    abominable    blas- 
phemy, perhaps  the  most  traitorous  of  all 
mankind's  treacheries— the  calumny  that 
woman  is  temperamentally  vicious.     And 
it  is  to  me  a  most  marvellous  thing,  almost 
the  greatest  tribute  to  Woman's  beauty, 
that  in  spite  of  this  long  and  strength- 
gathering  telepathy,  women  have  not  ac- 
cepted the  temperament  thus   attempted 
to  be  forced  upon  them  by  the  evil  thought 
of  sensual  ages.    In  some  respects  it  would 
appear  that  the  Feminist  Movement  is  an 
effort  on  the  part  of  Woman's  soul  to 
throw  off  this  hypnotic  iniauence  of  man's 
sexual  autocracy,  a  superb  effort  on  the 
purer  creature's  part  to  vindicate  her  chas- 
tity and  her  moral  grandeur. 
Now  religion  can  only  war  with  telepathy 


110         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

by  a  stronger  telepathy.  Legislation  wliich 
does  not  touch  this  telepathy  of  a  sensual 
age,  changes  nothing.  Men,  to  be  changed, 
must  be  changed  in  their  wills. 

Christ  gave  to  the  soul  a  new  thought, 
a  new  suggestion,  a  new  telepathy.  Into 
the  horrors  of  a  world  frightfully  ex- 
hausted by  debauchery  and  individualism 
He  breathed  the  revelation  of  a  new  life, 
the  inspiration  of  a  new  hope,  the  com- 
munication of  a  new  strength.  He  changed 
the  thoughts  of  men,  He  changed  their 
ideas.  He  changed  their  souls.  He  set 
Himself  to  amend  no  law,  to  alter  no 
custom,  to  effect  no  revolution  in  social 
conditions.  He  laid  His  healing  hands 
upon  the  souls  of  men  and  opened  their 
spiritual  eyes  to  something  of  which  they 
had  never  dreamed — a  new  life, 

Eeligion,  if  it  be  the  religion  of  this 
victorious  Christ,  must  be  still  the  revela- 
tion of  a  new  life,  the  inspiration  of  a 
new  hope,  the  communication  of  a  new 
strength.     If  it  is  not  neiv  it  is  nothing. 


CREATIVE  FORCE  OF  A  NEW  IDEA    111 

It  must  still  come  to  the  world  as  the 
saviour  of  souls,  the  giver  of  strength  and 
the  restorer  of  life,  not  as  the  social  re- 
former and  the  diffident  servant  of  science. 
Social  reform  and  the  discoveries  of  sci- 
ence may  be  used  by  religion,  religion  must 
indeed  Christianize  every  effort  of  man's 
mind  and  every  aspiration  of  his  soul  that 
is  Godward ;  but  the  centre  of  her  activity 
must  be  ever  that  spiritual  point  from 
which  there  can  radiate  the  hallowing 
power  of  Christ 's  continuing  presence  with 
humanity. 

At  this  dangerous  juncture  when  it  does 
indeed  seem  that  the  hour  of  the  stern 
encounter  is  approaching,  religion  must 
make  haste  to  seize  her  rightful  position- 
occupying  it  with  all  the  force  and  power 
of  an  absolute  conviction.  She  must  pro- 
claim and  in  a  voice  undoubting  and  en- 
thusiastic with  faith  that  Christ  is  in  very 
truth  the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  a  life 
utterly  different  from  the  world's;  the  in- 
spiration of  a  new  hope,  a  hope  of  very 


112         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

truth  more  glorious  than  the  world's;  the 
communication  of  a  new  strength,  a 
strength  infinitely  more  powerful  than  the 
world's.  In  a  word  she  must  meet  the 
active  suggestions  of  evil  with  the  active 
suggestions  of  good. 


IX 

THE  TELEPATHY  OF  PURITY 

A  GAINST  the  telepathy  of  animalism, 
A\  the  Church  must  set  the  telepathy  of 
Purity.  Let  her  make  trial  of  the 
creative  force  of  a  new  idea.  Let  her  sug- 
gest by  all  the  powers  at  her  disposal  that 
Purity  is  natural,  that  Impurity  is  a  per- 
version. 

This  is  the  new  idea  which  may  not  only 
rid  the  age  of  the  sex  obsession,  but  which 
may  stir  the  human  mind  from  stagnation 
and  drive  it  into  fresh  channels.  For  it 
must  be  recognized  that  the  undoubted 
preoccupation  of  this  period  with  sexual 
interests  is  considerably  due  to  the  dul- 
ness  and  uneventfulness  of  modern  life. 
Men  were  coarser  but  more  healthy  in  their 
animalism  when  life  was  crowded  with 
danger;  so  long  as  the  field  of  adventure 

113 


114*         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

was  open  to  them,  so  long  as  they  lived  in 
the  presence  of  action,  so  long  as  they  had 
healthful  occupations  of  mind  and  body, 
they  were  not  ridden  by  a  single  thought, 
they  were  not  victims  of  one  fixed  idea. 
But  now,  when  for  vast  multitudes  of  men 
living  in  unnatural  conditions,  labor  is  only 
a  dull  and  mechanical  means  of  earning  a 
fixed  wage,  when  life  is  so  mapped  and 
policed  that  even  youth  can  hope  for  no 
adventure  and  expect  no  excitement,  what 
is  there  left  for  men  who  are  not  con- 
scious of  Christianity's  new  life  save  this 
tarnished,  soiled,  and  morbid  perversion  of 
racial  instinct,  this  bending  over  the  dead 
bones  of  romance? 

In  the  heart  of  every  man  is  either  an 
altar  or  a  sepulchre.  He  must  be  either 
lifting  up  his  thoughts  into  the  light  of 
thanksgiving,  or  bending  them,  depressing 
them,  bowing  them  into  the  darkness  of  his 
own  spiritual  death.  He  must  be  either 
mounting  up  into  life,  or  sinking  down  into 
corruption. 


THE  TELEPATHY  OF  PURITY     115 

With  nothing  to  reverence,  nothing  to 
long  for,  nothing  to  possess  and  occupy  his 
soul,  man  tends  inevitably  to  prey  upon 
the  arrested  instincts  of  the  past,  pervert- 
ing what  w^s  once  rightful,  natural,  and 
healthy,  into  what  is  now  wrongful,  un- 
natural, and  deadly  to  health.  In  this  way 
civilization  has  tended  more  and  more  to 
force  the  thought  of  men  into  sensualism. 
The  day's  work  of  dull  toil  is  only  pos- 
sible because  of  the  evening's  freedom, 
the  evening's  freedom  only  anticipated 
with  pleasure  because  it  holds  the  promise 
of  adventure ;  and  the  only  promise  of  ad- 
venture now  lies  in  the  region  of  sexual 
romance.  The  streets  of  cities  are  crowded 
every  night  of  the  week  with  pathetic  mul- 
titudes seeking  escape  from  ennui  in  ad- 
ventures of  sex.  The  taverns  are  packed 
with  thousands  who  seek  to  drink  them- 
selves into  other  Ihood;  the  music-halls 
and  moving  picture  palaces  are  thronged 
with  thousands  who  hope  to  lose  their 
troublesome    Ihood    in    illusion;    but    the 


116        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

streets  are  thick  with  millions  who  are 
seeking  to  find  an  escape  from  this  same 
Ihood  in  the  diversion  of  romance — ro- 
mance which  is  sordid  or  vnlgar,  horrible 
or  iniquitous. 

Moreover  life  is  now  so  bounded  and 
standardized  that  not  only  the  wage- 
earners  are  conscious  of  ennui;  the 
leisured  classes  are  also  bored  out  of  pa- 
tience by  the  even  dulness  of  existence. 
The  scandals  of  society  are  caused  by  men 
and  women  seeking  an  escape  from  torpor. 
The  perilous  pleasures  of  the  rich  are  at- 
tempts to  create  excitement.  Men  now  go 
to  dinner  parties,  to  dances,  and  to  coun- 
try houses  seeking  adventure  and  ro- 
mance. They  may  escape  sensual  sins 
in  the  excitement  of  card-playing,  in  the 
occupations  of  shooting,  hunting,  fish- 
ing, motoring,  and  golf;  but  the  easi- 
est diversion,  the  most  exciting  adven- 
ture, lies  in  the  modern  perversion  of 
romance. 

Never  before  in  the  history  of  the  world, 


THE  TELEPATHY  OF  PURITY     117 

I  think,  was  so  pregnant  an  opportunity 
offered  to  evil.  Humanity  is  tired,  hu- 
manity is  not  interested  in  life,  humanity  is 
discontented  and  disillusioned.  How  dull 
is  mechanical  life,  how  exhausting  the 
mean  struggle  for  existence,  how  monoto- 
nous even  the  luxuries  and  pleasures  of 
wealth.  A  mind  is  presented  to  evil,  the 
collective  mind  of  over-civilized  humanity, 
which  has  no  strength  to  resist  suggestion, 
and  which  has  only  just  power  enough  to 
receive  ideas.  Into  this  mind.  Evil  is  send- 
ing the  suggestions  of  animalism.  A 
telepathy  is  in  operation  fatal  to  spiritual 
life.  Humanity,  exhausted  by  its  tremen- 
dous forward  pressure  into  physical  tri- 
umphs, is  beginning  to  go  backward 
morally.  It  has  worked  too  hard.  It  de- 
mands to  be  amused. 

Even  the  amusements  which  pass  for  in- 
tellectual are  smirched  with  moral  deca- 
dence, as  witness  the  following  paragraph 
from  a  leading  article  in  a  respectable 
newspaper : — 


118         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

"  The  old  question  of  the  narrow  line 
which  separates  the  amusing  from  the 
serious  has  been  raised  once  more  in 
connection  with  two  of  the  plays  pro- 
duced this  week.  In  Mr.  Shaw's  ^  An- 
drocles  and  the  Lion/  which  an  appre- 
ciative critic  calls  ^  the  most  amusing  of 
his  religious  plays,'  comic  capital  is 
sought  in  the  moral,  intellectual,  and 
physical  distresses  of  the  martyrs  of  the 
Early  Church.  In  Sir  J.  M.  Barrie's 
'  The  Adored  One  '  the  basis  of  two 
acts  (and  part  of  a  third)  of  elaborate 
fooling  is  a  murder.'' 

Is  it  not  plain  from  such  plays  that  hu- 
manity is  tired  and  exhausted  and  bored 
with  its  long  heredity!  Is  it  not  also 
plain  that  from  such  plays  a  telepathy  pro- 
ceeds which  is  harmful  and  bad,  a  telepathy 
which  is  in  fact  part  and  parcel  of  the  de- 
structive telepathy  of  baser  and  more  hon- 
est iniquity? 

To  counteract  this  suggestion  of  evil, 


THE  TELEPATHY  OF  PURITY     119 

religion  must  exert  her  own  suggestion; 
she  must  break  through  the  cynicism  and 
bitterness  of  humanity,  she  must  plough 
up  the  infinite  torpor  of  that  exhausted 
mind,  and  she  must  plant  there  the  seed  of 
a  new  idea — the  idea  that  Purity  is  natu- 
ral, that  Impurity  is  unnatural. 

The  creative  force  of  a  new  idea  is  more 
than  man  can  measure.  Let  us  trust  this 
rectifying  thought  concerning  Purity  and 
see  what  it  will  do  for  the  next  generation. 
Let  us  teach  children  not  so  much  to  fight 
against  Impurity,  and  not  so  much  to  strive 
after  Purity,  but  to  regard  Purity  as  natu- 
ral and  to  regard  Impurity  as  unnatural. 
Let  them,  I  mean,  face  towards  life  with 
the  conviction  in  their  minds  that  goodness 
is  the  law  of  their  being,  that  the  set  of 
their  souls  is  towards  virtue,  that  their 
strife  is  not  to  struggle  from  vice  into  vir- 
tue, but  to  advance  from  virtue  into  holi- 
ness. Let  them,  above  all  things,  be  cer- 
tainly taught  w^hen  they  are  of  an  age  to 
understand,  that  an  impure  woman  is  the 


UO         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

most  lonely  and  the  most  awful  rebel  in 
nature,  that  there  is  nothing  outside  hu- 
manity so  terribly  and  so  infinitely  de- 
graded as  a  creature  living  on  the  perver- 
sion of  the  purest  and  most  beautiful  of 
all  natural  instincts.  Let  this  idea  be  fos- 
tered in  the  mind  of  youth.  Let  it  be 
made  manifest  and  incontestable  to  the 
youth  of  both  sexes  that  the  commonest 
and  most  terrible  of  all  vices  is  in  very 
truth  the  perversion  of  that  holy  passion 
which  mankind  instinctively  adores,  the 
passion  of  motherhood. 

I  believe  that  it  has  not  yet  occurred  to 
one  man  in  ten  thousand  that  harlotry  is 
unknown  in  nature.  The  set  of  men's 
thoughts  for  ages  has  been  towards  toler- 
ance of  this  awful  perversion,  so  that  in 
spite  of  all  the  hard  words  and  contempt 
they  may  use  in  their  dealings  with  public 
women,  in  their  hearts  they  regard  this 
moral  degradation  of  the  nobler  sex  as  nat- 
ural and  inevitable.  One  may  find  among 
quite    virtuous    and    religious    people    an 


THE  TELEPATHY  OF  PURITY     121 

extraordinary  tolerance  in  this  matter,  a 
sorrowful  resignation  to  a  deplorable  state" 
of  things,  but  a  pained  conviction  that  thus 
it  has  always  been  and  thus  it  must  con- 
tinue to  be.  And  from  this  tolerance,  this 
terrible  acceptance  of  the  fallen  woman, 
come  all  other  forms  of  vice.  While  that 
tragic  figure  walks  the  streets  of  great 
cities,  the  sacrament  of  marriage  will  be 
blasphemed.  So  long  as  the  fallen  woman 
is  accepted,  Womanhood  can  never  be  ex- 
alted. And  until  women  are  pure  men  will 
not  be  godlike. 


a 


The  Harlot's  cry  from  street  to  street. 
Shall  be  old  England's  winding  sheet.'' 


It  is  to  be  earnestly  and  devoutly  hoped 
that  the  modern  movement  of  women  to- 
wards liberty,  so  soon  as  it  has  perceived 
how  little  can  be  accomplished  by  legisla- 
tion, will  concentrate  the  whole  of  its 
moral  energies  upon  this  scarlet  shame  of 
womanhood.     If  women  are  to  win  their 


n2         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

liberty,  if  they  are  to  claim  a  moral  and 
intellectual  and  political  equality  with  man, 
they  must  cleanse  the  minds  of  men  from 
the  loathsome  obsession  that  by  their  na- 
ture women  are  vicious ;  this  they  can  best 
begin  to  do  by  a  complete  and  total  restora- 
tion of  the  fallen  woman.  Salvation  lies 
for  women,  and  by  the  same  token  for  hu- 
manity, in  the  exaltation  of  Womanhood. 
It  is  impossible  while  thousands  of  women 
live  in  a  degradation  unknown  in  nature 
that  men  should  feel  that  holy  reverence 
for  women  which  is  their  strongest  human 
safeguard  against  impurity  and  baseness. 
Where  women  are  honored,  the  Divinities 
are  complacent :  where  they  are  despised,  it 
is  useless  to  pray  to  God, 


THE   HIGHER   TYPE    OF   MOTHER- 
HOOD 

A  LL  that  has  been  beautifully  said  about 
A\  Woman  and  about  Home  remains: 
but  how  much  has  been  said  on  these 
heads,  particularly  in  the  last  century, 
which  rings  false,  which  cloys  with  senti- 
mentalism,  which  inspires  the  cynic  and 
parodist  with  harmful  mockery? 

The  human  mind  refuses  to  be  cloyed. 
Sentimentalism  has  never  nourished  those 
mysterious  powers.  Romanticism  wears 
out;  it  only  irritates  and  infuriates  the 
mind's  sense  of  the  values  of  reality. 
Much  of  this  period's  rebellion  against  do- 
mestic life  may  have  its  spring  in  reaction 
from  mere  sentimentalism. 

There  is  really  little  to  hold  the  atten- 

123 


lU         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

tion  and  quicken  tlie  admiration  of  men 
in  the  managing  housewife  and  the  doting 
mother  of  the  last  generation.  Women  do 
not  attain  their  highest  when  they  are 
excellent  housekeepers  and  considerate 
mothers.  One  can  scarcely  imagine  any- 
thing more  insufferable  to  adventurous 
youth  than  to  be  imprisoned  in  one  of  those 
respectable  country  homes  of  the  provinces 
where  every  drape  is  straight  on  its  chair, 
where  the  tea  bell  rings  to  the  minute, 
where  the  greatest  possible  disaster  is  the 
failure  of  the  kitchen  range,  and  where  the 
good  habits  of  the  parents  are  proclaimed 
as  the  final  consummation  of  creative  evolu- 
tion. 

Such  households,  such  homes,  and  such 
m.others,  have  too  often  earned  the  praises 
of  religion;  they  have  too  often  been  ex- 
hibited by  religion  to  the  irritated  atten- 
tion of  youth  as  the  supreme  blessings  of 
human  life.  Religion,  most  lamentably,  is 
thus  associated  in  the  popular  mind  with 
all  those   qualities   in  modern   character 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     125 

which  are  so  disastrous  to  the  imaginative 
life,  associated,  too,  with  a  type  of  mother- 
hood which  can  never  exalt  the  soul  of 
mankind,  with  a  type  of  home  which  can 
never  satisfy  the  heart  of  man. 

And  yet  it  is  just  such  mothers,  just 
such  homes  as  these  which  present  to 
religion  one  of  its  great  opportuni- 
ties to  insist  upon  Christ  as  the  revela- 
tion of  a  new  life,  the  inspiration  of  a 
new  hope,  the  communication  of  a  new 
strength. 

These  mothers  are  merely  moral,  these 
homes  are  merely  respectable.  They  be- 
long to  the  old  life  of  paganism,  not  to  the 
new  hfe  of  Christianity.  They  exhibit 
none  of  the  persuasive  qualities  of  the  new 
revelation;  they  scarcely  differ  in  a  single 
respect  from  the  good  homes  of  the  world 
before  Christ ;  about  such  mothers  and  such 
homes  one  can  be  sentimental,  never  en- 
thusiastic. 

Now  since  it  is  of  the  very  highest  im- 
portance that  religion  should  restore  the 


126         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

home-life  of  civilized  nations,  and  should, 
to  accomplish  this  end,  create  fresh  rever- 
ence for  motherhood,  it  is  essential  that 
she  should  be  entirely  free  from  the  old 
false  sentimentalism  and  insist  with  ardor 
upon  the  real  qualities  of  motherhood  and 
the  real  nature  of  home.  It  is  an  age  of 
rebellion  and  a  time  of  transition.  The 
Church  must  face  this  difficult  hour  with 
reality  in  her  soul.  She  must  not  offer  to 
mankind  in  revolt  the  stale  comforts  of  a 
past  age  nor  the  false  ideals  which  have 
already  soured  the  souls  of  humanity. 

Instead,  then,  of  a  faint-hearted  attempt 
to  restore  the  old  conventional  idea  of 
home-life,  the  Church  should  see  whether 
she  cannot  offer  to  mankind  a  new  concep- 
tion of  this  human  centre,  whether  she  can- 
not bring  into  existence  a  truer  and  more 
persuasive  notion  of  family  life.  So  long 
as  she  considers  that  Christianity  has  defi- 
nitely established  itself  in  humanity,  and 
so  long  as  she  regards  the  civilized  nations 
as  successful  examples  of  Christianity  in 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     127 

action,  so  long,  of  course,  will  she  cling  to 
the  vanished  ideals  of  the  human  race, 
those  ideals  which  have  vanished  because 
they  were  false,  because  they  did  not  truly 
represent  the  new  hope  and  the  new  life, 
and  clinging  to  these  ideals  she  will  lose 
humanity.  But  when  she  perceives  and 
apprehends  that  Christianity  is  not  yet 
established  in  the  human  heart,  that  the 
civilized  nations  do  not  commend  Chris- 
tianity to  the  peoples  who  follow  other  re- 
ligions, do  not  exemplify  but  rather  distort, 
deform,  and  mutilate  the  Christian  idea, 
then  the  Church  may  take  heart  of  grace 
to  create  new  ideals  for  the  human  race 
out  of  her  discovery  that  Christ  is  the 
revelation  of  a  new  life  and  the  inspira- 
tion of  a  new  hope. 

^^  Our  worship,"  says  William  Temple, 
*^  is  something  laid  over  the  surface  of  our 
lives,  not  something  bursting  from  their 
inmost  depths.  We  go  to  church  in  fami- 
lies and  sit  in  our  own  pews;  we  say  our 
own  prayers,  and  pay  our  respects  to  our 


128        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

own  God ;  and  then  we  come  out  again  and 
go  to  our  own  homes,  to  get  our  own 
luncheons  or  our  own  suppers.  We  do  not 
concern  ourselves  with  the  people  in  the 
next  pew,  unless  they  sing  out  of  tune, 
when  we  brace  ourselves  for  the  extreme 
measure  of  turning  round  to  look  at  them. 
How  can  we  hope  to  realize  our  fellow- 
ship with  the  whole  company  of  believers 
in  the  Communion  of  Saints  when  this  is 
our  attitude  to  those  who  worship  at  our 
side?  We  know  some  little  fragment  of 
the  Grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and 
the  Love  of  God ;  of  the  Fellowship  of  the 
Holy  Ghost  we  know  virtually  nothing.'* 
{Foundations.    Chap,  vii,  p.  358.) 

It  would  seem  that  men  are  on  the  verge 
of  this  great  discovery,  that  Fellowship  is 
the  soul  of  the  Christian  idea.  We  are 
members  one  of  another,  we  form  a 
brotherhood,  and  we  are  sons  of  one  Fa- 
ther. Instead  of  individualism,  fellowship; 
instead  of  selfishness,  disinterested  kind- 
ness; instead  of  force,  love  to  the  utter- 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     129 

most.  When  we  see  this  aspect  of  Chris- 
tianity we  realize  that  it  is  indeed  the 
revelation  of  a  new  life.  And  yet  is  it  not 
the  aspect  of  Christianity  which  is  more 
palpable  and  manifest  than  any  other?  Is 
it  perhaps  because  theologians  have  warred 
so  fiercely  in  the  disputable  field  of  dogma 
that  the  Church  has  for  so  long  contentedly 
lived  her  new  life  in  the  old  world,  con- 
forming to  the  old  world  ^s  pagan  customs, 
believing  that  the  new  life  revealed  by 
Christ  is  concerned  only  with  the  specula- 
tions of  Divinity? 

But  Christ  is  the  revelation  of  a  new 
life.  The  life  He  brings  to  humanity  is  an 
actual  existence,  and  an  actual  existence 
entirely  different  from  the  existence  of 
those  who  live  without  the  inspiration  of 
His  new  hope  and  without  the  communica- 
tion of  His  new  strength.  Christ  reveals 
to  men  the  life  of  the  spirit.  He  sets  this 
spiritual  life  over  the  natural  life.  He  says 
that  to  gain  the  whole  world  and  to  lose  the 
soul  is  not  profitable.    Immortality   ex- 


130        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

plains  everything.  It  is  the  new  hope— an 
immortality  of  love,  a  persistence  of  the 
soul  after  death  in  the  ecstasies  of  love. 
God  is  a  Father.  God  so  loved  the  world 
that  He  gave  to  humanity  this  revelation 
of  Himself — this  revelation  of  love.  To 
enter  into  the  kingdom  of  our  Father  we 
must  exercise  love  one  toward  another. 
God's  Fatherhood  can  only  incarnate  itself 
in  Man's  Brotherhood.  The  fellowship  of 
the  Holy  Ghost  is  the  Church  of  Christ. 

When  this  revelation  comes  home  to  the 
soul  of  a  man  he  sees  at  once,  as  it  were  in 
a  flash  of  light,  that  human  existence  as  it 
is  now  organized,  whether  virtuous  or 
depraved,  does  not  express  the  Christ 
idea.  The  inequalities  of  wealth,  the  in- 
equalities of  housing,  the  inequalities  of 
nourishment,  the  inequalities  of  raiment, 
the  inequalities  of  joy,  leisure,  and  happi- 
ness— these  things  alone  compel  him  to  see 
that  the  Christ  idea  is  not  yet  realized  by 
humanity.  The  central  teaching,  the 
brotherhood  of  man,  a  brotherhood  founded 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     131 

upon  love,  living  for  immortality,  and 
marching  mtli  joy  and  expectation  towards 
God,  is  not  obeyed,  is  not  even  appre- 
hended. For  thousands  of  followers  of  the 
Way,  this  wonderful  new  life  of  Christ  is 
represented  by  attendance  at  church  and 
subscriptions  to  charities.  Brotherhood  is 
rhetoric. 

If  we  have  so  completely  failed  to  realize' 
the  Fellowship  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  is  it  not 
certain  that  all  our  ideals,  merely  from 
this  one  failure  to  understand  the  centre 
of  Christianity,  must  partake  of  error?  At 
least,  it  is  not  certain  that  the  conven- 
tional characters  of  this  partial  Christian- 
ity will  not  represent  the  real  Christian 
types? 

Consider  in  this  light  the  conventional 
character  of  the  Christian  mother.  She  de- 
votes herself  to  her  home-life;  she  is  a 
faithful  wife,  an  affectionate  parent;  she 
sets  the  comfort  of  her  husband  and  the 
well-being  of  her  children  before  any  con- 
siderations of  her  own  happiness;  she  is 


1S2        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

industrious,  she  is  loving,  she  is  hospitable, 
she  is  given  to  good  works. 

Now  in  what  manner  does  this  woman 
differ  from  the  good  women  of  other  na- 
tions who  are  not  Christian!  In  what 
respect  is  she  superior  to  the  Roman  ma- 
tron, or  better  than  the  Greek  mother  who 
worshipped  the  gods  and  schooled  her 
children  in  virtue!  Are  we  truly  sensible 
in  her  of  such  an  immense  difference  as 
one  rightfully  expects  to  find  in  a  woman 
to  whom  has  been  revealed  a  new  life,  to 
whom  has  come  a  new  hope,  and  in  whom 
exists  a  new  strength!  On  the  contrary, 
do  we  not  see  in  her  merely  the  average 
good  woman  to  be  found  all  over  the 
world  and  at  all  periods  in  the  history  of 
mankind!  Is  she  not  simply  the  natural 
pure  woman,  the  natural  kind  mother,  the 
natural  true  wife!  And  if  such  virtue  is 
really  all  that  is  required  of  us,  surely  the 
Incarnation  of  God  is  impossible  to  under- 
stand; surely  the  forces  of  evolution,  with 
Plato,  with  Seneca,  with  Marcus  Aurelius, 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     133 

even  with  Guicciardini  and  Mr.  Lecky  to 
help  ns,  might  have  brought  the  human 
species  as  far  as  this. 

It  is  obvious  that  such  good  women  do 
not  exemplify  the  motherhood  of  new  life. 
The  homes  which  they  have  blest  do  not 
typify  the  fellowship  of  the  Holy  Ghost, 
without  which  can  be  no  Brotherhood  of 
Man.  Some  other  ideal  must  be  discov- 
ered, some  truer  inspiration  found  for 
humanity. 

But  where  is  it  that  these  good  mothers 
have  failed?  Why  is  it  that  in  the  last 
analysis  they  are  no  different  from  the 
good  mothers  of  a  pagan  world? 

The  centre  of  their  failure  is  the  centre 
of  the  Churches  failure — the  inability  or 
refusal  to  realize  the  truth  of  human 
brotherhood.  These  good  women  have 
loved  their  children  for  their  own  sake  and 
for  the  world's  sake;  they  have  labored  to 
make  them  successful  and  prosperous ;  they 
have  striven  and  denied  themselves  that 
their  children  might  make  a  fine  appear- 


134         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

ance ;  tliey  have  hoped  that  they  might  get 
on  in  the  world ;  they  have  prayed  that  the 
good  name  of  the  family  might  never  suf- 
fer; they  have  used  morality  and  religion 
as  conventions  of  society  to  aid  the  ma- 
terial prosperity  of  their  children.  Not 
once  has  it  occurred  to  them  that  Christ  is 
the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  a  life  quite 
different  from  the  life  of  a  particular  so- 
cial circle,  or  the  life  of  an  ugly,  struggling, 
soul-crushing  commercialism.  They  have 
accepted  the  world,  they  have  accepted  the 
life  of  the  world,  they  really  have  no 
strength  except  the  world's  strength. 
They  are  subservient,  most  of  them,  to  the 
rich  and  the  powerful;  they  are  observant 
of  conventions  which  neither  touch  char- 
acter nor  stimulate  the  soul;  virtuous  and 
religious  themselves,  they  mix  with  a  world 
not  virtuous  and  not  religious,  without 
seeking  to  change  the  soul  of  that  world, 
caring  about  it,  interested  in  it,  and  only 
anxious  not  to  give  offence.  The  world 
knows  that  the  religious  people  who  asso- 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     135 

ciate  with  it  are  interested  in  its  ways  and 
impressed  by  its  spirit.  The  plutocrat  de- 
clares that  every  man  has  his  price.  So- 
ciety is  flattered  by  the  curiosity  of  the 
religious  and  says  that  religion  is  a  matter 
of  temperament.  The  good  mothers  dis- 
approve of  certain  things,  but  they  ac- 
cept society's  life.  Religion  has  trans- 
formed nothing  for  them.  Life  is  what 
it  is,  and  they  can  make  nothing  more 
of  it. 

Now,  if  from  the  first  they  had  believed 
that  Christ  is  the  revelation  of  a  new  life 
and  had  perceived  that  the  world's  life 
is  a  false  life  and  a  bad  life,  and  further- 
more if  they  had  realized  that  this  world's 
life  is  only  what  it  is  for  a  moment  of  time, 
that  it  is  for  ever  in  the  act  of  growth,  for 
ever  changing  its  clothes  and  its  thoughts, 
that  far  from  being  unalterable  it  is  the 
most  inconstant  alterable  thing  on  earth, 
then  might  they  have  felt  the  inspiration 
and  the  strength  to  make  something  of 
their  motherhood  which  would  have  served 


136         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

humanity  and  hastened  the  Kingdom  of 
God. 

For,  then,  instead  of  considering  the 
worldly  futures  of  their  children  and  the 
good  repute  of  the  family  name,  and  in- 
stead of  making  religion  ^*  something  laid 
over  the  surface  of  our  lives,  not  something 
bursting  from  the  inmost  depths, ''  these 
good  mothers  would  have  been  inspired 
with  enthusiasm  for  humanity,  would  have 
striven  to  make  their  children  heroes  of 
God.  And  this  is  the  supreme  difference 
between  the  good  mother  and  the  mother 
to  whom  Christ  is  in  very  deed  the  revela- 
tion of  a  new  life.  Not  that  her  children 
may  succeed  in  the  world,  but  rather  that 
they  may  help  those  who  do  not  succeed: 
not  that  her  children  may  be  prosperous 
and  renowned  but  that  they  may  so  live  as 
to  be  a  rebuke  to  worldly  prosperity  and 
worldly  renown :  not  that  her  family  name 
may  be  untarnished  but  that  the  name  of 
humanity  may  lose  its  reproach:  not  that 
her  children  should  keep  the  laws  and  ob- 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     137 

serve  the  conventions  of  the  respectable 
world,  but  that  they  should  keep  only  the 
two  great  laws  of  Christ — love  towards 
God  and  love  towards  Man:  not  that  her 
children  should  strive,  struggle,  and 
wrestle  with  the  world,  but  that  they 
should  stand  apart  in  the  simplicities  and 
radiating  peace  of  wills  that  rest  in  God, — 
this  is  the  passion  and  these  are  the  ideals 
of  the  woman  whose  motherhood  is  con- 
secrated, beautified,  and  rendered  divine 
by  the  Spirit  of  Christ. 

Such  a  mother  as  this,  to  whom  life  is 
really  a  new  thing,  will  not  accept,  cannot 
possibly  accept,  the  compromise  which  vir- 
tue makes  with  the  world.  She  must  of 
necessity  live  a  new  life,  a  life  which  tran- 
scends the  life  of  the  world.  She  will  not 
be  deluded  and  deceived  by  the  appear- 
ances of  respectability.  She  will  not,  for 
example,  send  her  children  to  school  with 
the  idea  that  they  shall  pass  certain  ex- 
aminations, enter  particular  professions, 
and  thus  assure  themselves  of  comfortable 


138         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

incomes.  She  will  labor,  on  tlie  other  hand, 
to  destroy  in  the  souls  of  her  children 
those  movements  of  our  barbarous  past 
which  we  describe  as  "  praiseworthy  am- 
bitions/' Her  scheme  of  education  will 
be  to  deepen  and  intensify  spiritual  life. 
From  infancy  her  children  will  be  sur- 
rounded by  simple  and  beautiful  things; 
she  will  be  as  careful  to  keep  away  from 
them  luxurious  and  ugly  things  as  to  de- 
fend them  from  infection  or  evil;  she  will 
develop  their  faculty  of  observation;  en- 
courage the  habit  of  reflection ;  direct  their 
interest  and  wonderment  into  the  region  of 
worship,  adoration,  and  love ;  her  own  life 
of  self-sacrifice,  of  compassion,  of  humility, 
and  of  tenderness  will  shine  into  the  souls 
of  her  children  with  the  beauty  and  attrac- 
tion of  Christ.  She  will  have  one  object 
and  only  one — to  make  her  children  serv- 
ants of  the  Brotherhood. 

Through  such  mothers  as  these  and,  as 
I  think,  only  through  such  mothers  as 
these,  can  humanity  hope  to  realize  the 


HIGHER  TYPE  OF  MOTHERHOOD     139 

Brotherhood  of  Man.  There  must  be  this 
Motherhood  before  there  can  be  that 
Brotherhood.  Nor  need  the  Church  shrink 
from  exalting  such  a  type  of  Motherhood 
in  the  fear  that  the  ideal  is  beyond  the 
reach  of  humanity;  the  other  type  is  worn 
out  and  discarded;  it  was  false,  it  was 
pagan,  it  was  without  passion  and  without 
beauty.  The  only  other  alternative  is  the 
sexless  mother  of  society. 

Let  the  Church  acknowledge  that  Christ 
is  the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  and  she 
will  not  fear  to  exalt  the  higher  type  of 
Motherhood.  Let  her  see,  too,  that  this 
higher  type  of  Motherhood  can  alone  bring 
about  the  Brotherhood  of  Man,  indeed  can 
alone  save  our  civilizations  from  extinc- 
tion, and  she  will  find  the  inspiration  as 
well  as  the  courage  for  her  mission.  Fur- 
thermore, let  her  realize  that  this  Mother- 
hood which  seems  too  difficult  and  high  for 
humanity  is  in  truth  the  easiest,  the  sim- 
plest, the  most  complete  and  the  most  satis- 
fying of  all  forms  of  Motherhood,  and  then 


140         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

she  may  wake  out  of  her  nightmare  and 
proclaim  Christ  with  a  living  faith  as  the 
revelation  of  a  new  life,  the  inspiration 
of  a  new  hope,  and  the  communication  of  a 
new  strength. 


XI 
EELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE 

MEN  in  earnest  about  life  are  turning 
more  and  more  away  from  religion 
and  are  looking  with  even  greater 
expectation  towards  science.  It  is  in  sci- 
ence they  find  the  revelation  of  a  new  life, 
not  in  religion;  it  is  to  science,  not  to  re- 
ligion, they  make  their  appeal  for  ^  ^  a  new 
Keformation." 

Let  me  quote  a  significant  passage  which 
occurred  recently  in  a  leading  article  of  a 
London  newspaper.  This  newspaper 
recognizes  the  crisis  of  the  present  age, 
and  invites  the  ordinary  man  to  interest 
himself  in  science  for  the  promise  science 
holds  of  happiness  and  nobler  life: — 

*'  He  would  find  a  new  meaning  in  the 
care  of  his  body,  home,  and  habits;  he 

141 


14a         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

would  appreciate  the  trust  that  he  holds 
for  the  common  cause  in  the  right  di- 
rection of  his  personal  life;  and  he 
would  not  forget  the  part  he  has  to 
play  in  safeguarding  the  springs  of 
heredity  and  in  laying  his  own  stones 
well  and  truly  in  the  building  of  the 
future  generations.  The  moral  health 
of  a  people  requires  that  conduct  shall 
be  touched  everywhere  by  imagination. 
Science  has  within  itself  the  spark  which 
can  kindle  the  routine  of  daily  existence 
to  a  new  significance  and  link  it  with  the 
furthest  dreams.  It  is  for  men  of  sci- 
ence to  bethink  themselves  how  they  can 
spread  their  New  Learning  to  be  the 
agent  of  a  new  Reformation.'' 

Is  not  this  appeal  a  rebuke  to  the  Christ? 
**  The  moral  health  of  a  people  requires 
that  conduct  shall  be  touched  everywhere 
by  imagination.''  Seeley  saw  this,  too, 
and  said  *'  no  heart  is  pure  that  is  not  pas- 
sionate; no  virtue  is  safe  that  is  not  en- 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    143 

tlmsiastic ";  but  he  added  '*  such  an 
enthusiastic  virtue  Christ  was  to  intro- 
duce." To-day  the  publicist  says,  *^  Sci- 
ence has  within  itself  the  spark  which 
can  kindle  the  routine  of  daily  existence 
to  a  new  significance  and  link  it  with  the 
furthest  dreams.''  Eeligion  is  not  men- 
tioned even  in  a  parenthesis. 

But  I  have  quoted  this  passage  not  so 
much  to  rebuke  and  awaken  the  Church  as 
to  suggest  that  in  the  matter  of  home-life 
religion  must  seek  a  definite  alliance  with 
science.  If  we  are  to  rid  ourselves  of  the 
sentimentalism  referred  to  in  the  last  chap- 
ter, and  if  we  are  to  seek  a  new  ideal  of 
home,  a  new  ideal  of  family  life,  it  is  to 
science  we  must  go  for  the  new  Learning 
which  is  to  be  the  agent  of  a  new  Keforma- 
tion.  For  it  is  true  that  a  man  conscious 
of  the  definite  teaching  of  science  finds  *'  a 
new  meaning  in  the  care  of  his  body,  home, 
and  habits  '';  he  is  not  living  on  the  sen- 
timentalism of  his  fathers,  but  rationally 
and  vividly  in  the  light  of  indisputable 


144        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

knowledge.  He  is  interested  in  his  body  as 
an  engineer  is  interested  in  his  engine;  he 
is  as  interested  in  his  home  as  a  carpenter 
is  interested  in  the  building  of  his  own 
house,  he  is  interested  in  his  habits  as  a 
general  is  interested  in  the  fitness  and 
efficiency  of  the  troops  under  his  command. 
To  such  a  man  life  is  not  a  blundering, 
staggering,  and  blindfold  alternation  be- 
tween surrender  to  temperament  and  re- 
spect for  social  laws ;  it  is  a  steady,  beguil- 
ing, and  dignified  advance  in  moral  evolu- 
tion. 

Nevertheless  without  *^  the  sacred  pas- 
sion of  the  second  life,^'  without  the  beauty 
and  the  glory  of  religion,  how  dull,  how 
prosaic,  how  trivial  and  self-conscious  be- 
comes the  life  of  such  a  man!  The  father 
of  Tristram  Shandy  will  never  warm  the 
blood  of  humanity,  nor  is  Professor  Hux- 
ley, with  all  his  fine  qualities,  a  hero  who 
uplifts  the  soul. 

With  religion  science  is  the  hope  of  the 
future ;  without  science  religion  will  never 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    145 

recover  the  present  generation's  respect, 
interest,  and  optimism. 

It  is  agreed  on  all  hands  that  the  most 
pressing  social  need  is  a  reconstruction  of 
family  life.  The  greatest  danger  to  civili- 
zation lies  in  the  disruption  of  the  home 
and  the  decay  of  the  family.  Men  of  sci- 
ence, politicians,  and  ministers  of  the 
Church  are  of  one  mind  on  this  matter. 
Let  us  inquire  then  at  the  end  of  our  mono- 
graph, what  may  be  done  by  this  human 
trinity,  by  science,  politics,  and  religion, 
to  bring  about  the  most  urgent  and  the 
most  essential  reformation  of  our  times. 

We    have    suggested    that   the    Church  / 
should    recover    its    earliest    enthusiasm,  \ 
and    with    a    living    faith    in    Christ    as    ) 
the  revelation  of  a  new  life,  should  insist 
upon  Purity  as  the  rock  of  character — 
purity  not  only  of  conduct,  but  of  the  in- 
ward life.    We  have  advanced  the  convic- 
tion that  until  Woman  is  restored  to  her 
natural  dignity  all  our  painful  and  heroic 
struggles    for    political    betterment    will 


146        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

prove  abortive.  We  have  urged  the  Church 
to  preach  a  new  Gospel  of  the  sexes  from 
nature's  text  that  Purity  is  natural,  Im- 
purity is  perversion.  We  have  suggested 
that  the  Church  should  institute  a  national 
crusade  in  the  name  of  Christ  and  for  the 
sake  of  humanity,  and  should  seek  the 
assistance  of  the  politician  and  the  man  of 
science  in  such  legislation  as  shall  prevent 
the  machinations  of  immorality. 

These  tilings,  we  earnestly  believe,  are 
first  things  and  must  come  first.  But 
pressing  close  on  their  heels  must  come  the 
reformation  of  home-life  which  is  to  give 
humanity  a  new  Motherhood.  In  conclu- 
sion, then,  let  us  see  what  can  be  brought 
to  religion  by  science  and  politics  in  the 
great  concernment  of  creating  for  civiliza- 
tion a  new  and  nobler  family  life. 

Already  a  step  has  been  taken  in  the 
right  direction  by  Ireland,  where  the  Rural 
Community  is  becoming  every  day  a  more 
settled  part  of  the  national  existence. 
America  has  already  sent  to  Ireland  a 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    147 

Commission  of  Agricultural  Enquiry 
which  was  addressed  by  Mr.  George  Eus- 
sell  on  the  subject  of  the  Rural  Community. 
Denmark,  Germany,  and  Italy  are  moving 
in  the  same  direction — the  direction  of  co- 
operation, brotherhood,  fellowship.  We 
must  build  up  throughout  the  land  as  soon 
as  may  be  these  Rural  Communities — 
**  The  eternal  task  of  building  up  a  civiliza- 
tion in  nature,  the  task  so  often  disturbed, 
the  labor  so  often  destroyed  ' ' ; — we  must 
plant  out  in  our  fields  these  brotherhoods, 
these  communities  of  toiling  men,  these 
fellowships  of  laboring  humanity;  and  we 
must  see  to  it  that  such  communities,  if 
they  get  their  implements  from  science,  and 
find  their  title  deeds  in  politics,  should  seek 
their  inspiration  in  religion. 

But  when  all  this  is  accomplished,  what 
shall  be  done  with  the  home  in  the  town, 
with  family  life  in  the  city!  It  is  neces- 
sary, says  Mr.  Russell,  for  the  creation  of 
citizens,  for  the  building  up  of  a  noble 
national  life,  that  the  social  order  should 


148         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

be  reorganized,  that  the  sense  of  inter- 
dependence should  be  constantly  felt;  and 
he  adds:  ^' It  is  also  necessary  for  the 
preservation  of  the  physical  health  and 
beauty  of  our  race,  that  more  of  our  people 
shall  live  in  the  country  and  fewer  in  the 
cities/' 

He  proceeds : 

*  *  I  believe  it  would  be  an  excellent  thing 
for  humanity  if  its  civilization  could  be 
based  on  rural  industry  and  not  on  urban 
industry.  More  and  more  men  and  women 
in  our  modern  civilization  drift  out  of  na- 
ture, out  of  sweet  air,  health,  strength, 
beauty,  into  the  cities,  where  in  the  third 
generation  there  is  a  rickety  population, 
mean  in  stature,  feverish  and  depraved  in 
character,  with  the  image  of  the  Devil  in 
mind  and  matter  more  than  the  image  of 
Deity.  Those  who  go,  like  it  at  first,  but 
city  life  is  like  the  roll  spoken  of  by  the 
prophet  which  was  sweet  in  the  mouth  but 
bitter  in  the  belly.  The  first  generation 
are  intoxicated  by  the  new  life,  but  in  the 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    149 

third  generation  the  cord  is  cut  which 
connected  them  with  Nature,  the  Great 
Mother,  and  life  shrivels  up  sundered  from 
the  source  of  life.  Is  there  any  prophet, 
any  statesman,  any  leader,  who  will,  as 
•Moses  once  led  the  Israelites  out  of  the 
Egyptian  bondage,  excite  the  imagination 
and  lead  humanity  back  to  nature,  to  sun- 
light, starlight,  earth  breath,  sweet  air, 
beauty,  gaiety,  and  health!  Is  it  impos- 
sible now  to  move  humanity  by  great 
ideals,  as  Mahomet  fired  his  dark  hosts  to 
forgetfulness  of  life,  or  as  Peter  the  Her- 
mit awakened  Europe  to  a  frenzy  so  that 
it  hurried  its  hot  chivalry  across  a  Conti- 
nent to  the  Holy  Land!  Is  not  the  earth 
Mother  of  us  all!  Are  not  our  spirits 
clothed  round  with  the  substance  of  earth! 
Is  it  not  from  Nature  we  draw  life!  Do  we 
not  perish  without  sunlight  and  fresh  air! 
Let  us  have  no  breath  of  air  and  in  five 
minutes  life  is  extinct.  Yet  in  the  cities 
there  is  a  slow  poisoning  of  life  going  on 
day  by  day. 


150        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

^^  The  lover  of  beauty  may  walk  the 
streets  of  London  or  any  big  city  and 
may  look  into  ten  thousand  faces  and  see 
none  that  is  lovely.  Is  not  the  return  of 
man  to  a  natural  life  on  the  earth  a  great 
enough  idea  to  inspire  humanity?  Is  not 
the  idea  of  a  civilization  amid  the  green 
trees  and  fields  under  the  smokeless  sky 
alluring?  Yes,  but  men  say  there  is  no 
intellectual  life  working  on  the  land.  No 
intellectual  life  when  man  is  surrounded 
by  mystery  and  miracle !  When  the  mys- 
terious forces  which  bring  to  birth  and  life 
are  yet  undiscovered,  when  earth  is  teem- 
ing with  life,  and  the  dumb  bro^vTi  lips  of 
the  ridges  are  breathing  mystery.  Is  not 
the  growth  of  a  tree  from  a  tiny  cell  hid- 
den in  the  earth  as  provocative  of  thought 
as  the  things  men  learn  at  the  schools?  Is 
not  thought  on  these  things  more  interest- 
ing than  the  sophistries  of  the  newspapers'? 
It  is  only  in  nature  and  by  thought  on  the 
problems  of  Nature  that  our  intellect  grows 
to  any  real  truth  and  draws  near  to  the 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    151 

Mighty  Mind  which  laid  the  foundations  of 
the  world. ' ' 

Unquestionably  the  ideal  for  humanity  is 
the  breaking  up  of  great  cities,  and  the 
building  of  commercial  centres  in  the  midst 
of  the  dignity  and  beauty  and  restplaces 
of  nature.  But  cities  will  remain ;  masses 
of  mankind  will  always  live  an  artificial 
existence;  the  problem  of  family  life  in 
the  towns  will  persist.  What  must  we  do 
to  dignify  and  consecrate  that  life  of  the 
home? 

One  of  the  great  aids  which  religion  can 
seek  from  science  applies  equally  to  town 
and  country.  It  is  the  aidance  of  archi- 
tecture. The  houses  of  a  past  generation 
witness  to  an  absolute  contempt  of  Fel- 
lowship. Our  fathers  not  only  saw  no 
scandal  in  building  the  houses  of  the  poor 
in  frightful  contrast  to  the  houses  of  the 
rich,  but  even  in  the  palaces,  mansions,  and 
villas  of  the  rich  thrust  without  shame  the 
servants  that  waited  upon  them  into  dark 
unhealthy    cellars    and    miserable    attics. 


15S         THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

Moreover,  these  houses,  the  rich  man's  and 
the  poor  man's,  were  built  without  any 
serious  reference  to  the  labor  of  domestic 
life,  and,  further,  they  were  built  before 
science  had  revolutionized  the  toils  and  the 
hardships  of  the  housewife  with  a  dozen 
appliances  for  making  life  pleasant  and 
agreeable.  It  is  now  possible  to  build 
houses  which  are  beautiful,  convenient,  and 
easy  to  manage.  Electricity  has  become 
the  universal  servant  to  humanity;  under 
the  control  of  municipalities  it  can  be  ab- 
solutely made  to  revolutionize  the  life  of 
the  poor,  it  can  be  made  to  light  their 
houses,  to  cook  their  meals,  to  clean  and 
dust  their  rooms.  With  scientific  planning 
a  town  which  contains  millions  of  people 
can  yet  be  healthful  and  beautiful :  London, 
for  instance,  so  far  as  the  metropoli- 
tan area  is  concerned,  could  be  so  re- 
planned  and  rebuilt  as  a  rural  village 
of  cottages  like  Port  Sunlight  and  yet 
hold  ten  more  millions  of  human  beings. 
Our  present  arrangement,  says  Sir  Wil- 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    153 

liam    Lever,    is    simply   a    case    of   bad 
packing. 

Eeligion,  then,  can  hopefully  demand  for 
the  new  home-life  of  Civilization  the  aid  of 
science  and  politics.  Statesmen  must  get 
the  land  and  provide  the  money ;  men  of  sci- 
ence must  devise  with  architects  the  com- 
mercial city  and  the  convenient  house;  re- 
ligion must  consecrate  this  rebuilding  to 
the  glory  of  God  and  the  service  of  hu- 
manity. 

In  every  city  there  should  be  divisions 
into  communities,  and  each  community 
should  be  founded  upon  the  basis  of  co- 
operation; and  this  co-operation  should  be 
domestic  as  well  as  commercial.  There 
should  be  kitchens  for  every  square  of 
houses,  kitchens,  wash-houses,  and  stores: 
there  should  be  municipal  places  of  refresh- 
ment and  entertainment,  the  public  bar  be- 
ing wiped  out  of  existence  as  an  intolerable 
anachronism:  there  should  also  be  for 
every  square  of  houses  a  nursery  man- 
aged by  efficient  and  religiously-inspired 


154*        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

nurses  where  mothers  might  leave  their 
children  for  an  hour,  a  day,  a  week.  Every- 
thing should  be  done  to  render  the  duties 
of  Motherhood  not  merely  .light  and  easy 
but  beautiful  and  encouraging.  The  chief 
pride  of  each  community  should  be  the 
health,  intelligence,  and  conduct  of  its  chil- 
dren. Man  should  find  his  highest  pleasure 
and  his  deepest  amusement  in  the  King- 
dom of  Childhood.  Some  of  the  decay  in 
family  life  may  justly  be  attributed,  I 
think,  to  the  dreadful  ugliness  of  so  many 
city  children,  and  to  the  sickness,  the  pee- 
vishness, and  the  everlasting  anxiety  of 
children  wrongly  fed  and  vilely  treated  by 
women  ignorant  of  motherhood. 

And  the  work  of  religion  would  not  end 
with  this  political  and  scientific  reforma- 
tion. A  man  can  see,  and  at  no  very  great 
distance,  a  political  and  a  scientific  per- 
fection ;  where  an  end  can  be  seen  the  spirit 
of  adventure  flags.  What  religion  can  do 
is  to  breathe  into  the  tired  soul  of  an  ex- 
hausted civilization  the  tremendous  energy 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    155 

of  an  everlasting  progress  in  spiritual 
achievement,  the  hope  and  confident  expec- 
tation of  adventures  undreamed  of  by  the 
prophets,  a  new  universe  for  mankind. 

Professor  Forsyth  was  speaking  not 
long  ago  on  the  disappointment  of  old  age ; 
he  referred  to  the  weariness  and  tedium 
which  overcame  men  when  they  retired 
from  active  work  in  the  world.  '  ^  Does  th^ 
leisure, '^  he  asked,  ''  that  they  looked  for- 
ward to  bring  them  what  they  hoped  for? 
In  how  many  cases  are  they  eaten  up  by 
ennui?  .  .  .  Their  old  age  becomes  dull, 
the  dullest  part  of  their  life.    Why  is  it?  " 

He  gave  the  true  answer.  ^^  They  have 
never  cultivated  in  their  business  life  the 
higher  and  more  spiritual  interests.  We 
are  here  to  pass  from  the  one  kind  of  free- 
dom to  the  other  kind  of  freedom,  the  free- 
dom in  Christ.  .  .  .  There  is  nothing  so 
serious  in  connection  with  the  manhood 
and  womanhood  of  the  present  day  as  the 
course  of  pursuing  enjoyment  and  refus- 
ing responsibility.'' 


156        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

But  why  do  men  pursue  a  phantom? 
Why,  in  spite  of  all  the  pessimisms  of 
philosophy  and  all  the  protests  of  religion, 
does  humanity  still  seek  enjoyment  where 
no  enjoyment  is  to  be  found,  and  strive 
for  satisfaction  where  only  disenchantment 
and  bitter  mockery  await  it! 

Is  it  not  because  the  Church  has  failed 
to  convince  mankind  that  it  offers  a  su- 
perior happiness? 

It  is  natural  for  man  to  seek  happiness. 
It  is  the  work  of  Sisyphus  to  forbid  pleas- 
ure and  to  denounce  enjoyment.  Man  was 
made  for  joy  as  the  sparks  fly  upward. 
God  surrounds  him  with  majesty,  with 
beauty,  with  pleasure,  and  with  love.  The 
revelation  of  Christ  is  the  revelation  of 
a  new  life  where  true  joys  are  to  be  found. 
The  Incarnation  is  God's  healing  brought 
to  humanity's  disease.  *'  I  am  come  that 
they  might  have  life,  and  that  they  might 
have  it  more  abundantly."  ''  My  joy  no 
man  taketh  from  you."  The  whole  spirit 
of   Christianity  is  blessing,   the   one  ob- 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    157 

jective  of  Christ  the  perfection  of  Happi- 
ness. 

This  is  the  work  of  religion,  to  recover 
for  a  disappointed,  dejected,  and  cynical 
human  race  the  energy  of  its  purest  joy. 
And  the  path  of  the  Church  at  this  time 
is  along  the  way  of  revelation — to  reveal  to 
mankind  that  the  life  of  the  spirit  is  the 
joyful  and  the  adventurous  life,  that 
whereas  the  life  of  the  flesh  and  the  life 
of  the  mind  have  an  end,  the  life  of  the 
spirit  is  endless.  Nor  must  she  insist  only 
on  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  but  on  the 
power  of  the  spirit  here  and  now.  She 
must  teach  that  materialism  is  working  it- 
self out,  that  science  is  almost  at  the  end 
of  its  exploration  in  the  physical  world, 
that  soon  the  whole  force  of  humanity's 
unconquerable  mind  will  be  directed  to  the 
religion  of  the  spirit.  And  here  what  high 
adventures  must  await  us,  what  discov- 
eries of  force  and  power  never  suspected, 
what  light  on  the  darkness  of  the  past, 
what   gateways   into   the   unguessed   and 


158        THE  CRISIS  OF  MORALS 

the  invisible!  Spiritual  evolution,  spirit- 
ual discovery,  spiritual  adventures,  this 
is  the  great  excitement  of  the  future. 
Not  a  ravenous  pursuit  of  fortune  and  self; 
but  a  ravenous  pursuit  of  truth — ''  The 
mind  always  attentive  and  always  satis- 
fied/' 

Surely  men  will  look  back  upon  us  with 
wonder  and  pity.  Our  pompous  novels 
about  adulterous  wives,  our  comic  plays 
about  martyrdom  and  murder,  our  dirty- 
minded  advertisements,  our  prurient  pic- 
tures and  photographs,  our  violent  battles 
over  self-government  and  the  monetary 
endowments  of  a  church,  our  newspapers 
crowded  with  sensationalism  from  the 
police-court,  our  armies  and  navies  crush- 
ing democracy  to  the  mud  of  the  gutter, 
our  hideous  architecture,  our  insanitary 
slums,  our  soul-killing  and  brutalizing  com- 
petition— how  these  things  will  strike  with 
amazement  those  who  have  discovered  the 
spiritual  life,  whose  characters  are  founded 
upon  inward  Purity,  and  who  go  to  the 


RELIGION  ALLIED  WITH  SCIENCE    159 

yellow  pages  of  the  last  century's  diction- 
ary preserved  in  museums  for  the  explana- 
tion of  such  a  phrase  as  a  fallen  woman. 

If  men  are  tired  of  existence  let  them 
know  that  they  have  not  yet  opened  the 
book  of  Life,  that  they  are  still  reading  the 
condemnation  of  ignorance  and  the  judg- 
ment upon  sin  in  the  book  of  Death. 

**  Life  to  be  fruitful  must  be  felt  as  a 
blessing." 

''  BLESSED  ABE  TEE  PUBE  IN 

HEABT, 
FOB   THEY  SHALL  SEE   GOD/' 


PRINTED   IN   THE    UNITED   STATES    OF    AMERICA 


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HQ291.B41 1914 
The  crisis  of  morals; 


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Princeton  Theological  Seminary-Speer  Library 


1    1012  00025  4211 


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